Caponsacchi. But even in the Rome of that evil day justice
was not extinct. Guido's motive is proved to be false; he himself is
condemned to death. An appeal to the Pope is futile. Finally, the
wretched man pays the too merciful penalty of his villainy.

There is nothing grand, nothing noble here: at most only a tragic pathos
in the fate of the innocent child-wife Pompilia. It is clear, therefore,
that the greatness of "The Ring and the Book" must depend even less upon
its subject, its motive, than upon its being "an extraordinary feat" in
the gymnastics of verse.

In a sense, Browning's longest work is akin to that of his wife. Both
"The Ring and the Book" and "Aurora Leigh" are metrical novels. The one
is discursive in episodes and spiritual experiences: the other in
intricacies of evidence. But there the parallel ends. If "The Ring and
the Book" were deflowered of its blooms of poetry and rendered into a
prose narrative, it might interest a barrister "getting up" a criminal
case, but it would be much inferior to, say, "The Moonstone"; its author
would be insignificant beside the ingenious M. Gaboriau. The
extraordinariness of the feat would then be but indifferently commented
upon.

As neither its subject, nor its extraordinariness as a feat, nor its
method, will withstand a searching examination, we must endeavour to
discern if transcendent poetic merit be discoverable in the treatment.
To arrive at a just estimate it is needful to free the mind not merely
from preconceptions, but from that niggardliness of insight which can
perceive only the minor flaws and shortcomings almost inevitable to any
vast literary achievement, and be blind to the superb merits. One must
prepare oneself to listen to a new musician, with mind and body alert
to the novel harmonies, and oblivious of what other musicians have done
or refrained from doing.

"The Ring and the Book," as I have said, was not begun in the year of
its imagining.[15] It is necessary to anticipate the biographical
narrative, and state that the finding of the parchment-booklet happened
in the fourth year of the poet's widowerhood, for his happy married
period of less than fifteen years came to a close in 1861.

[Footnote 15: The title is explained as follows:--"The story of the
Franceschini case, as Mr. Browning relates it, forms a circle of
evidence to its one central truth; and this circle was constructed in
the manner in which the worker in Etruscan gold prepa