rds, the monologue will be his
prevailing mode of expression, but each will often form an independent
work. "The Ring and the Book" is thus our next object of interest.

Mr. Browning was strolling one day through a square in Florence, the
Piazza San Lorenzo, which is a standing market for old clothes, old
furniture, and old curiosities of every kind, when a parchment-covered
book attracted his eye, from amidst the artistic or nondescript rubbish
of one of the stalls. It was the record of a murder which had taken
place in Rome, and bore inside it an inscription which Mr. Browning thus
transcribes:--

"... A Roman murder-case:
Position of the entire criminal cause
Of Guido Franceschini, nobleman,
With certain Four the cut-throats in his pay,
Tried, all five, and found guilty and put to death
By heading or hanging as befitted ranks,
At Rome on February Twenty-Two,
Since our salvation Sixteen Ninety-Eight:
Wherein it is disputed if, and when,
Husbands may kill adulterous wives, yet 'scape
The customary forfeit." (vol. viii. p. 6.)

The book proved, on examination, to contain the whole history of the
case, as carried on in writing, after the fashion of those days:
pleadings and counter-pleadings, the depositions of defendants and
witnesses; manuscript letters announcing the execution of the murderer;
and the "instrument of the Definitive Sentence" which established the
perfect innocence of the murdered wife: these various documents having
been collected and bound together by some person interested in the
trial, possibly the very Cencini, friend of the Franceschini family, to
whom the manuscript letters are addressed. Mr. Browning bought the whole
for the value of eightpence, and it became the raw material of what
appeared four years later as "The Ring and the Book."

This name 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 prepares the ornamental circlet which will
be worn as a ring. The pure metal is too soft to bear hammer or file; it
must be mixed with alloy to gain the necessary power of resistance. The
ring once formed and embossed, the alloy is disengaged, and a pure gold
ornament remains. Mr. Browning's material was also i