have found an issue from the
situation as easily as an ordinary Hamlet from his task of vengeance.
But Mertoun and Mildred are at once too timid and too audacious, too
tremulous in their consciousness of guilt, too hardy and reckless in
their mutual devotion, to carry through so difficult a game. Mertoun
falters and stammers in his suit to Tresham; Mildred stands mute at her
brother's charge, incapable of evasion, only resolute not to betray.
Yet these same two children in the arts of politic self-defence are
found recklessly courting the peril of midnight meetings in Mildred's
chamber with the aid of all the approved resources and ruses of
romance--the disguise, the convenient tree, the signal set in the
window, the lover's serenade. And when the lover, who dared all risks to
his lady and to himself for a stolen interview with her night by night,
finally encounters Tresham, he is instantly paralysed, and will not even
lift a sword in his own defence. Upon this union of boundless daring for
one another's sake and sensibility to the shame of having wronged the
house and blotted the 'scutcheon Mertoun's fate hangs, and with his
Mildred's, and with hers Tresham's.

Beside the tragedy and the stain of the love of Mertoun and Mildred,
Browning characteristically sets the calm, immaculate, cousinly
affection of Gwendolen and Austin. One has a glimpse here of his
habitual criticism of all satisfied attainment, of all easy completeness
on a low plane. It is Gwendolen herself who half disarms that criticism,
or makes it, as applied to her, more pathetic than trenchant by
instantly detecting and proclaiming the different quality of Mertoun's
love. "Mark him, Austin: that's true love! Ours must begin again." In
Tresham Browning seems to have designed to portray the finest type of
ancestral pride. He is "proud" of his "interminable line," because the
men were all "paladins" and the women all of flawless honour; and he
has the chivalrous tenderness of ideal knighthood, as well as its
honourable pride. When Mertoun has received his death-stroke and told
his story, the tenderness comes out; the sullied image of his
passionately loved sister not only recovers its appeal, but rises up
before him in mute intolerable reproach; and Mildred has scarcely
breathed her last in his arms when Tresham succumbs to the poison he has
taken in remorse for his hasty act. It is unlucky that this tragic
climax, finely conceived as it is, is marred by th