nadequate to his
purpose, though from a different cause. It was too _hard_. It was "pure
crude fact," secreted from the fluid being of the men and women whose
experience it had formed. In its existing state it would have broken up
under the artistic attempt to weld and round it. He supplied an alloy,
the alloy of fancy, or--as he also calls it--of one fact more: this fact
being the echo of those past existences awakened within his own. He
breathed into the dead record the breath of his own life; and when his
ring of evidence had re-formed, first in elastic then in solid strength,
here delicately incised, there broadly stamped with human thought and
passion, he could cast fancy aside, and bid his readers recognize in
what he set before them unadulterated human truth.

All this was not effected at once. The separate scenes of the
Franceschini tragedy sprang to life in Mr. Browning's imagination within
a few hours of his reading the book. He saw them re-enacted from his
terrace at Casa Guidi on a sultry summer night--every place and person
projected, as it seemed, against the thundery sky--but his mind did not
yet weave them into a whole. The drama lay by him and in him till the
unconscious inspiration was complete; and then, one day in London, he
felt what he thus describes:--

"A spirit laughs and leaps through every limb,
And lights my eye, and lifts me by the hair,
Letting me have my will again with these...."
(vol. viii. p. 32.)

and "The Ring and the Book" was born. All this is told in an
introductory chapter, which bears the title of the whole work; and here
also Mr. Browning reviews those broad facts of the Franceschini case
which are beyond dispute, and which constitute, so far as they go, the
crude metal of his ring. He has worked into this almost every incident
which the chronicle supplies and his book requires no supplement. But
the fragmentary view of its contents, which I am reduced to giving, can
only be held together by a previous outline of the story.

There lived in Rome in 1679 Pietro and Violante Comparini, an elderly
couple of the middle class, fond of show and good living, and who in
spite of a fair income had run considerably into debt. They were, indeed
at the period in question, in receipt of a papal bounty, employed in the
relief of the needy who did not like to beg. Creditors were pressing,
and only one expedient suggested itself: t