FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 60:  This is emphasized by the ingenious motto from King Lear:  “You, Sir, I entertain you for one of my hundred; only, I do not like the fashion of your garments:  you will say, they are Persian; but let them be changed.”]

[Footnote 61:  Handbook, p. 321.]

31.  PARLEYINGS WITH CERTAIN PEOPLE OF IMPORTANCE IN THEIR DAY.

    [Published in January 1887. Poetical Works, 1889, Vol. 
    XVI., pp. 93-275.]

The method of the Parleying is something of a new departure, and at the same time something of a reversion.  It is a reversion towards the dramatic form of the monologue; but it is a new departure owing to the precise form assumed, that of a “parleying” or colloquy of the author with his characters.  The persons with whom Browning parleys are representative men selected from the England, Holland, and Italy of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.  The parleying with Bernard de Mandeville (born at Dort, in Holland, 1670; died in London, 1733; author of The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits) takes up the optimistic arguments already developed in Ferishtah’s Fancies and elsewhere, and preaches, through the dubious medium of the enigmatic fabulist, trust in the ordering of the world, confidence in discerning a “soul of goodness in things evil.” Daniel Bartoli ("a learned and ingenius writer,” born at Florence, 1608; died at Rome, 1685; the historian of the Order of Jesuits) serves to point a moral against himself, in the contrast between the pale ineffectual saints of his legendary record and the practically saint-like heroine of a true tale recounted by Browning, the graphic and brilliant story of the duke and the druggist’s daughter.  The parleying with Christopher Smart (the author of the Song to David, born at Shipborne, in Kent, 1722; died in the King’s Bench, 1770) is a penetrating and characteristic study in one of the great poetic problems of the eighteenth century, the problem of a “void and null” verse-writer who, at one moment only of his life, sang, as Browning reminds him,

      “A song where flute-breath silvers trumpet-clang,
      And stations you for once on either hand
      With Milton and with Keats.”

George Bubb Dodington (Lord Melcombe, born 1691; died 1762) stands as type of the dishonest politician, and in the course of a colloquy, which is really a piece of sardonic irony long drawn out, a mock serious essay in the way of a Superior Rogues’ Guide or Instructions for Knaves, receives at once castigation and instruction.  The parleying with Francis Furini (born at Florence, 1600; died 1649) deals with its hero as a man, as artist and as priest; it contains some of Browning’s noblest writing on art; and it touches on current and, indeed, continual controversies in its splendidly vigorous onslaught