His last play it practically was, if we overlook the fragmentary In a Balcony, and A Soul's Tragedy, which is inconceivable as an affair for the stage. In certain respects it is also his best play, although it lacks the singleness and directness of impression that marks A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, and has no character comparable in simplicity to Mildred. Luria is a Moor "from Othello's country," and it is possible that Browning's conception of him was influenced by the thought of Othello. He is at all events the same "free and open nature that thinks men honest when they seem to be so," and one to whom "the flinty and steel couch of war was his "thrice driven bed of down." Not a Moor of Venice but of Florence, he is a Mercenary fighting against Lucca, Pisa, and Siena. While he gains the victory his enemies of the seigniory are manufacturing evidence and weaving toils about him that he may be condemned for treason in the hour of triumph,this from diplomatic distrust of an alien who may put power and popularity to dangerous uses. At the critical moment Luria discovers the treachery and the means of revenge. The Pisan general urges him to desert the Florence by which he has been betrayed, for the generalship of the enemy's forces which he offers to resign to him. His fidelity to his adopted city is not, however, to be transferred. His soliloquy upon the situation hints also at the danger to Florence if he should passively await the result of her action against him. What then? I ruin Florence, teach her friends mistrust, Confirm her enemies in harsh belief, And when she finds one day, as find she must, The strange mistake and how my heart was hers, Walk with a sadder step, in graver guise, Who took me with such frankness, praised me so, This point has been missed, apparently, by the most of Browning's commentators, yet the climax of the tragedy, Luria's suicide, is not adequately explained without it. It is the final consecration of character, and turns an act of almost cowardly despair into a sacrifice to the Very God of loyalty. Luria dies not merely from grief and disappointment, but because he cannot in any other way prevent the debasement of his city. If he lives she will add to her history the record of a deed of inconceivable ingratitude. If he dies, the danger is averted, and her enemies will never be able to accuse her.1 The gravity and dignity of Luria make up for many minor defects. It is hardly a stage play; the monologues are long and involved, the action is scanty and slow, and there is no strong centre of interest outside the decision of Luria's problem, but the sustained nobility and frankness of the Moor against the crafty background of Italian diplomacy is impressive, and the general grasp of the varied ele 1 No perspicacity is required to interpret this part of Luria since the publication of the letters to Miss Barrett, as Browning himself explains it fully. See vol. ii., page 424. ments, national and individual, is much stronger than in any previous play of equal complexity. It is interesting to learn from the letters to Miss Barrett that Browning meant at first to make the part of the quasi-heroine-Domizia-one of greater importance. Among his memoranda for the fifth act was this note "she loves," but by his own confession he "could not bring it." She does not love, and his Othello is obliged to hold the audience without the aid of a Desdemona. When Luria was published in the last number of Bells and Pomegranates Browning felt that he was through for the time with dramatic writing in the technical sense. "Let all that I have done," he wrote to Miss Barrett, "be the prelude, and the real work begin." U CHAPTER IV. ELIZABETH BARRETT. NTIL 1897, when Mr. Kenyon edited her letters with biographical editions, no accurate impression had been given of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Confusion existed concerning even the date and place of her birth, few details of her life were accessible, and an extravagant conception of a woman at once romantic and pedantic prevailed. This was due in part to the invalid life she had led, and in part to her great dislike of talking about her own affairs even with her intimate friends. Browning, in a letter to Dr. Furnivall (obviously replying to a request for biographical information), declares : "The personality of my wife was so strong and peculiar that I had no curiosity to go beyond it, and concern myself with matters which she was evidently disinclined to communicate. I believe I discovered her birthday-the day, not the date-three weeks ago when engaged in some search after missing letters." The circumstances of her marriage, the apparently romantic secrecy of her flight from home to become Browning's wife, added colour to the sentimental and somewhat sensational accounts of her that got abroad; but now that Mr. Kenyon's book and the recently published love-letters are accessible, it is comparatively easy to piece together the plain story of a singularly interesting lite. Elizabeth Barrett Barrett was born at Coxhoe Hall, about five miles south of the city of Durham, on the 6th of March, 1806. Her father's name was originally Edward Barrett Moulton, the supplementary Barrett being added on the death of his maternal grandfather to whose Jamaica estates he fell heir. The full name-Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrettwas so long that, "to make it portable," its owner "fell into the habit of doubling it up and packing it closely." 66 sac Her brothers sometimes reproached her for rificing the governorship of an old town in Norfolk with a little honourable verdigris from the Herald's Office"; but she seems to have had little ancestorworship in her composition. "As if I cared for the Retrospective Review," she says, and adds the curious statement: Nevertheless it is true that I would give ten towns in Norfolk (if I had them) to own some purer lineage than that of the blood of the slave. Cursed we are from generation to generation!-I seem to hear the Commination Service." This reference to "the blood of the slave" in her |