defect of feeling to fail in admiration of that
admired final tableau in which the formidable carpenter is discovered
building a toy Kremlin for his five children. We can take for granted
that the excellent homicide, having done so simple a bit of the day's
work as that of decapitating a fellow-creature, proceeds tranquilly to
other innocent pleasures and duties; we do not require the ostentatious
theatrical group, with limelight effects on the Kremlin and the
honey-coloured beard, displayed for our benefit just before the curtain
is rung down.[142]

[Illustration: SPECIMEN OF BROWNING'S HANDWRITING.

_From a letter to D.S. CURTIS, Esq._]

_Martin Relph_ is a story of life-long remorse, self-condemnation and
self-denunciation; there is something approaching the supernatural, and
yet terribly real, in the figure of the strange old man with a beard as
white as snow, standing, on a bright May day, in monumental grief, and
exposing his ulcerated heart to the spectators who form for him a kind
of posterity. One instant's failure in the probation of life, one
momentary syncope of his better nature long years ago, has condemned his
whole after-existence to become a climbing of the purgatorial mount,
with an agony of pain annually renewed at the season when the earth
rejoices. Only a high-strung delicate spirit is capable of such a
perennial passion of penitence. _Ned Bratts_ may be described as a
companion, but a contrasted piece. It is a story of sudden conversion
and of penitence taking an immediate and highly effective form. The
humour of the poem, which is excellent of its kind, resembles more the
humour of Rowlandson than that of Hogarth. The Bedford Court House on
the sweltering Midsummer Day, the Puritan recusants, reeking of piety
and the cow-house conventicle, the Judges at high jinks upon the
bench--to whom, all in a muck-sweat and ablaze with the fervour of
conversion, enter Black Ned, the stout publican, and big Tab, his slut
of a wife,--these are drawn after the broad British style of humorous
illustration, which combines a frank exaggeration of the characteristic
lines with, at times, a certain grace in deformity. Here at least is
downright belief in the invisible, here is genuine conviction driven
home by the Spirit of God and the terror of hell-fire. Black Ned and the
slut Tabby as yet may not seem the most suitable additions to the
company of the blessed who move singing

In solemn troops and sweet soc