s, unknowing; but after
his consent, learns from a servant that Mildred has yielded herself to a
man--he learns not _whom_. She, accused, makes no denial, gives no name,
and to her brother's consternation, proposes thus to marry her suitor,
whom Tresham thinks to be in ignorance of her error. Tresham violently
repudiates her; then, meeting beneath her window the cloaked lover,
attacks him, forces him to reveal himself, learns that he and the
accepted suitor are one and the same, and kills him--Mertoun (the lover)
making no defence. Tresham goes to Mildred and tells her what he has
done; she dies of the hearing, and he, having taken poison after the
revelation of Mertoun's identity, dies also.

The defects in this story are so obvious that I need hardly point them
out. Most prominent of all is the difficulty of reconciling Earl
Mertoun's conduct with that of a rational being. He is all that in
Mildred's suitor might be demanded, yet, loving her deeply and so loved
by her, he has feared to ask her brother for her hand, because of his
reverence for this Earl Tresham.

". . . I was young,
And your surpassing reputation kept me
So far aloof . . ."

Thus he explains himself. He feared to ask for her hand, yet did not
fear to seduce her! The thing is so absurd that it vitiates all the
play, which indeed but once or twice approaches aught that we can figure
to ourselves of reality in any period of history. "Mediaeval" is a
strange adjective, used by Mrs. Orr to characterise a work of which the
date is placed by Browning himself in the eighteenth century.

Mildred is but fourteen: an age at which, with our modern sense of
girlhood as, happily, in this land we now know it, we find ourselves
unable to apprehend her at all. Instinctively we assign to her at least
five years more, since even these would leave her still a child--though
not at any moment in the play does she actually so affect us, for
Mildred is never a child, never even a young girl. Immature indeed she
is, but it is with the immaturity which will not develop, which has
nothing to do with length of years. To me, the failure here is absolute;
she never comes to life. Every student of Browning knows of the
enthusiasm which Dickens expressed for this piece and this character:

"Browning's play has thrown me into a perfect passion of
sorrow. To say that there is anything in its subject save what
is lovely, true, dee