A poem of quite another order of art, a life-like sketch rather than a creation, is found in Waring.  The original of Waring was one of Browning’s friends, Alfred Domett, the author of Ranolf and Amohia, then or afterwards Prime Minister in New Zealand.[18] The poem is written in a free and familiar style, which rises from time to time into a kind of precipitate brilliance; it is more personal in detail than Browning often allows himself to be; and its humour is blithe and friendly.  In another poem, now known as Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, the humour is grotesque, bitter and pungent, the humour of hate.  The snarling monk of the Spanish cloister pours out on poor, innocent, unsuspecting “Brother Lawrence” a wealth of really choice and masterly vituperation, not to be matched out of Shakespeare.  The poem is a clever study of that mood of active disgust which most of us have felt toward some possibly inoffensive enough person, whose every word, look or action jars on the nerves.  It flashes, too, a brilliant comic light on the natural tendencies of asceticism.  Side by side with this poem, under the general name of Camp and Cloister, was published the vigorous and touching little ballad now known as Incident of the French Camp, a stirring lyric of war, such as Browning has always been able, rarely as he has cared, to write.  The ringing Cavalier Tunes (so graphically set to music by Sir C. Villiers Stanford) strike the same note; so, too, does the wonderfully clever little riding poem, Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr, a tour de force strung together on a single rhyme:  “As I ride, as I ride.”

Count Gismond, the companion of My Last Duchess, is a vivid little tale, told with genuine sympathy with the mediaeval spirit.  It is almost like an anticipation of some of the remarkable studies of the Middle Ages contained in Morris’s first and best book of poems, The Defence of Guenevere, published sixteen years later.  The mediaeval temper of entire confidence in the ordeal by duel has never been better rendered than in these two stanzas, the very kernel of the poem, spoken by the falsely-accused girl:—­

      " ...  Till out strode Gismond; then I knew
        That I was saved.  I never met
      His face before, but, at first view,
        I felt quite sure that God had set
      Himself to Satan; who would spend
      A minute’s mistrust on the end?

      He strode to Gauthier, in his throat
        Gave him the lie, then struck his mouth
      With one back-handed blow that wrote
        In blood men’s verdict there.  North, South,
      East, West, I looked.  The lie was dead,
      And damned, and truth stood up instead."[19]