FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 141: Mr Gosse: "Dictionary of National Biography," Supplement,
i. 317.]

[Footnote 142: Of the mother in this poem, a writer in the "Browning
Society's Papers," Miss E.D. West, said justly: "There is discernible in
her no soul which could be cleansed from guilt by any purgatorial
process.... Her fault had not been moral, had not been sin, to be
punished by pain inflicted on the soul; it was merely the uncounteracted
primary instinct of self-preservation, and as such it is fitliest dealt
with by the simple depriving her, without further penalty, of the very
life which she had secured for herself at so horrible a cost."]

[Footnote 143: The story of the melon-seller was related by a
correspondent of _The Times_ in 1846, and is told by Browning in a
letter to Miss Barrett of Aug. 6 of that year. Thus subjects of verse
rose up in his memory after many years.]

Chapter XVII

Closing Works and Days

_Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day_, published
in 1887, Browning's last volume but one, betrays not the slightest
decline in his mental vigour. It suffers, however, from the fact that
several of the "Parleyings" are discussions--emotional, it is true, as
well as intellectual--of somewhat abstract themes, that these
discussions are often prolonged beyond what the subject requires, and
that the "People of Importance" are in some instances not men and women,
but mere sounding-boards to throw out Browning's own voice. When certain
aspects or principles of art are considered in _Fra Lippo Lippi_, before
us stands Brother Lippo himself, a living, breathing figure, on whom our
interest must needs fasten whatever may be the subject of his discourse.
There is of course a propriety in connecting a debate on evil in the
world as a means to good with the name of the author of "The Fable of
the Bees," there is no impropriety in connecting a study of the
philosophy of music with the name of Charles Avison the Newcastle
organist; but we do not make acquaintance through the parleyings with
either Avison or Mandeville. This objection does not apply to all the
poems. The parleying _With Daniel Bartoli_ is a story of love and loss,
admirable in its presentation of the heroine and the unheroic hero. We
are interested in Francis Furini, "good priest, good man, good painter,"
before he begins to preach his somewhat portentous sermon on evolution.
And in the case of Christopher Smart, the ques