ype defines itself; as a condition of knowledge; as a test of what
is right; as a motive to life and virtue so indispensable that it must
exist as illusion if it did not exist as fact; because, therefore, its
existence cannot detract from the goodness of the First Cause or the
promise which that contains.

This constant assertion of the necessity of evil would land Mr. Browning
in a dilemma, if the axiom were presented by him in any character of
dogmatic truth: since it claims priority for certain laws of thought
over a Being which, if Omnipotent, must have created them. But the
anomaly disappears in the more floating outlines of a poetic personal
experience; and Mr. Browning (alias Furini) once more assures us that
what he "knows" of the nature and mode of action of the First Cause he
knows for himself only. How it operates for others is of the essence of
the mystery which enfolds him. Whether even the means of his own
instruction is reality or illusion, fiction or fact, is beyond his ken;
he is satisfied that it should be so.

Mr. Browning reverts to his defence of the nude in the description of a
picture--exhibited last year at the Grosvenor Gallery--the subject of
which he offers to Furini for treatment in the manner described.[129]

With GERARD DE LAIRESSE is a critical reminiscence of the unreal and
mythological in art, and its immediate subject a Belgian painter, born
at Liege, but who nourished at Amsterdam in the second half of the
seventeenth century. De Lairesse was a man of varied artistic culture as
well as versatile skill; but he was saturated with the pseudo-classical
spirit of the later period of the renaissance; and landscape itself
scarcely existed for him but as a setting for mythological incident or a
subject for embellishment by it. This is curiously apparent in a
treatise on the Art of Painting, which he composed, and, by a form of
dictation, also illustrated, when at the age of fifty he had lost his
sight. An English version of this fell into Mr. Browning's hands while
he was yet a child, and the deep and, at the time, delightful impression
which it made upon him is the motive of the present poem. Foremost in
his memory is an imaginary "Walk,"[130] in which the exercise of fancy
which the author practises and, Mr. Browning tells us, enjoins, is
strikingly displayed by his "conjecturing" Phaeton's tomb from the
evidence of a carved thunderbolt in an empty sepulchre, and the remains
of the "Char