im,
from the window, "How go on your flowers? None double?
Not one fruit-sort can you spy?" Laurence, it must be understood,
kindly answers him in the negative, and then he chuckles to himself,
"Strange!--and I, too, at such trouble, keep 'em close-nipped
on the sly!" He thinks of devising means of causing him to trip on
a great text in Galatians, entailing "twenty-nine distinct damnations,
one sure, if another fails"; or of slyly putting his
"scrofulous French novel" in his way, which will make him
"grovel hand and foot in Belial's gripe". In his malignity,
he is ready to pledge his soul to Satan (leaving a flaw
in the indenture), to see blasted that rose-acacia Laurence is
so proud of. Here the vesper-bell interrupts his filthy
and blasphemous eructations, and he turns up his eyes and folds his
hands on his breast, mumbling "Plena gratia ave Virgo!"
and right upon the prayer, his disgust breaks out, "Gr-r-r--you swine!"

This monologue affords a signal illustration of the poet's skill
in making a speaker, while directly revealing his own character,
reflect very distinctly the character of another. This has been seen
in `My Last Duchess', given as an example of the constitution
of this art-form, in the section of the Introduction on
`Browning's Obscurity'.

"The `Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister', is a picture
(ghastly in its evident truth) of superstition which has survived religion;
of a heart which has abandoned the love of kindred and friends,
only to lose itself in a wilderness of petty spite, terminating in an abyss
of diabolical hatred. The ordinary providential helps to goodness
have been rejected; the ill-provided adventurer has sought to scale
the high snow-peaks of saintliness,--he has missed his footing,--
and the black chasm which yawns beneath, has ingulfed him."
--E. J. H{asell}, in St. Paul's Magazine, December, 1870.

An able writer in `The Contemporary Review', Vol. IV., p. 140,
justly remarks:--

"No living writer--and we do not know any one in the past who
can be named, in this respect, in the same breath with him {Browning}
--approaches his power of analyzing and reproducing the morbid forms,
the corrupt semblances, the hypocrisies, formalisms, and fanaticisms of
man's religious life. The wildness of an Antinomian predestinarianism
has never been so grandly painted as in `Johannes Agricola
in Meditation'; the white heat of the persecutor glares on us,
like a nightmare spectre, i