r all; and now the fact stares them in the face that, printing being
so simple, the Hussite may publish his heresies as well as the Churchman
his truth, and the old sure remedy of burning him and his talk together
will no longer avail. One of the two Divines on whom this impresses
itself had indeed "been struck by it from the first."

The poem concludes with a joke on the name of Huss, which (I am told) is
the Bohemian equivalent for "goose," and his reported prophecy of the
advent and the triumph of Luther: which prophecy Fust re-echoes.[140]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 121: We must remark that these arguments are not directed
against Atheism and its naturalistic philosophy, which supplies, in Mr.
Browning's judgment, a consistent, if erroneous, solution of the
problem. They only attack the position of those who would retain the
belief in a personal God, and yet divest Him of every quality which
makes such a Being thinkable.]

[Footnote 122: It has been wrongly inferred from the passage in question
that Mr. Browning admits the pretensions of science to solve the
problems of the universe.]

[Footnote 123: The "goddess-sent plague" woven by Lachesis into the
destiny of Admetus was a vengeance of Artemis which befell him on the
day of his marriage. He had slighted her by omitting the usual
sacrifice, and in punishment of this she sent a crowd of serpents to
meet him in the nuptial chamber; but Apollo effected a reconciliation
between them.]

[Footnote 124: He had, as a young man, so great an admiration for one of
Bartoli's works, "De' Simboli trasportati al Morale," that when he
travelled he always carried it with him.]

[Footnote 125: Her reply was that if she possessed any influence over M.
de Lorraine she would never use it to make him do anything so contrary
to his honour and to his interests; she already sufficiently reproached
herself for the marriage to which his friendship for her had impelled
him; and would rather be "Marianne" to the end of her days than become
Duchess on such conditions The reply has been necessarily modified in
Mr. Browning's more poetic rendering of the scene]

[Footnote 126: Indented,--for want of writing materials,--with a key on
the wainscot of his cell.]

[Footnote 127: Created Lord Melcombe a year before his death:
sufficiently known by his diary from March, 1748, to Feb., 1761. See its
character in the Preface to the original edition by his relation, Henry
Penruddocke Wyndham, 178