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The greatest development of character is seen in Guido, who starts with a defiant spirit of certain victory, but gradually becomes more subdued and abject, when he finds that he is to be killed, and finally shrieks in agony for the help of his victim, Pompilia. In Caponsacchi there is the inward questioning of the right and the wrong.

"Some day I'll read you Pompilia, little Suzanne," said Bocqueraz. "Do you know Pompilia? Do you know Alice Meynell and some of Patmore's stuff, and the 'Dread of Height'?" "I don't know anything," said Susan, feeling it true. "Well," he said gaily, "we'll read them all!" Susan presently poured his tea; her guest wheeling his great leather chair so that its arm touched the arm of her own.

The man's incurable sense of the mother in his lawful wife was uttered by Browning in one of his two or three truly shattering lines of genius, when he makes the execrable Guido fall back finally upon the fact of marriage and the wife whom he has trodden like mire: "Christ! Maria! God, Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"

Nobler diction and a nobler meaning could not have been put into the mouth of Pompilia, or Rabbi Ben Ezra. It is in reality put into the mouth of a vulgar, fashionable priest, justifying his own cowardice over the comfortable wine and the cigars. Along with this tendency to poetry among Browning's knaves, must be reckoned another characteristic, their uniform tendency to theism.

Scarcely an instance of a conventional, or so-called man's woman, occurs in their whole range. Excepting perhaps the speaker in 'A Woman's Last Word', 'Pompilia' and 'Mildred' are the nearest approach to it; and in both of these we find qualities of imagination or thought which place them outside the conventional type.

He is a strongly-drawn character, full of passion and noble desires. Pompilia, who has an intuitive knowledge of the right, is one of Browning's sweetest and purest women. From descriptions of Mrs. Browning, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne gave, we may conclude that she furnished the suggestion for many of Pompilia's characteristics.

The poser is triumphant, because the critic is tacitly appealing to the normal standard of probabilities in our own day. In the tragedy of Pompilia we are taken far from the serene and homely region in which some of our teachers would fain have it that the whole moral universe can be snugly pent up.