ess life
And gentle face and girlish form he found,
And thus flings back. Go practise if you please
With men and women. Leave a child alone
For Christ's particular love's sake!"

Then, burning with pity and indignation, he proceeds to tell the story
of Pompilia as he sees it, feels it--and as Browning, in the issue,
makes us see and feel it too.

In _The Ring and the Book_, Browning tells us this story--this "pure
crude fact" (for fact it actually is)--_ten times over_, through nine
different persons, Guido Franceschini, the husband, speaking twice.
Stated thus baldly, the plan may sound almost absurd, and the prospect
of reading the work appear a tedious one; but once begin it, and neither
impression survives for a moment. Each telling is at once the same and
new--for in each the speaker's point of view is altered. We get, first
of all, Browning's own summary of the "pure crude fact"; then the
appearance of that fact to:

1. Half-Rome, antagonistic to Pompilia.

2. The Other Half, sympathetic to her.

3. "Tertium Quid," neutral.

4. Count Guido Franceschini, at his trial.

5. Giuseppe Caponsacchi (the priest with whom Pompilia fled),
at the trial.

6. Pompilia, on her death-bed.

7. Count Guido's counsel, preparing his speech for the
defence.

8. The Public Prosecutor's speech.

9. The Pope, considering his decision on Guido's appeal to him
after the trial.

10. Guido, at the last interview with his spiritual advisers
before execution.

Only the speeches of the two lawyers are wholly tedious; the rest of the
survey is absorbing. Not a point which can be urged on any side is
omitted, as that side presents itself; yet in the event, as I have said,
one overmastering effect stands forth--the utter loveliness and purity
of Pompilia. "She is the heroine," says Mr. Arthur Symons,[126:1] "as
neither Guido nor Caponsacchi can be called the hero. . . . With hardly
[any] consciousness of herself, [she] makes and unmakes the lives and
characters of those about her"; and in this way he compares her story
with Pippa's: "the mere passing of an innocent child."

And so, here, have we not indeed the victim? But though I spoke of
weariness, I must take back the words; for here too we have indeed the
beauty and the glory of suffering, and here the beauty and the glory of
manhood. Guido, like all evil things, is Nothingness: he se