uthentic part of the
narrative concludes with his admission into a neighbouring convent (the
Osservanza) where he was cleansed and fed. But Mr. Browning allows Fancy
the just employment of telling how the Superior improved the occasion,
and how his lesson was received.

"It is a great mistake," this reverend person assures his guest--though
one from which his own youth has not been free--"to imagine that any one
man can preach another out of his folly. If such endeavours could
succeed, heaven would have begun on earth. Whereas, every man's task is
to leaven earth with heaven, by working towards the end to which his
Master points, without dreaming that he can ever attain it. Man, in
short, is to be not the 'spare horse,' but the 'mill-horse' plodding
patiently round and round on the same spot."

And Pacchiarotto replies that his monitor's arguments are, by his own
account, doomed to be ineffectual: but that he is addressing himself to
one already convinced. He (Pacchiarotto) never was so by living man; but
he has been convinced by a dead one. That corpse has seemed to ask him
by its grin, why he should join it before his time because men are not
all made on the same pattern: "Because, above, one's Jack and
one--John." And the same grin has reminded him that this life is the
rehearsal, not the real performance: just an hour's trial of who is fit,
and who isn't, to play his part; that the parts are distributed by the
author, whose purpose will be explained in proper time; and that when
his brother has been cast for a fool's part, he is no sage who would
persuade him to give it up. He is now going back to his paint-pot, and
will mind his own business in future.

By an easy transition, Mr. Browning turns the laugh against his own
critics, whom he professes to recognize on this May morning, as flocking
into his garden in the guise of sweeps. He does not, he says, grudge
them their fun or their one holiday of the year, the less so that their
rattling and drumming may give him some inkling how music sounds; and he
flings them, by way of a gift, the story he has just told, bidding them
dance, and "dust" his "jacket" for a little while. But that done, he
bids them clear off, lest his housemaid should compel them to do so. He
has her authority for suspecting that in their professional character
they bring more dirt into the house than they remove from it[92].

"FILIPPO BALDINUCCI" was the author of a history of art ("Notizie