47^ CRITICAL STUDIES his Pompilia, as of Dante and his Beatrice, that when- ever she is brought in, however austere or terrible or vile the surroundings, immediately an ineffable sweet- ness, a Divine tenderness, suffuses and thrills the verse. The marvellous power and insight of the two Guido sections have been equally acknowledged. The excellent critic of the Westminster Review gave his verdict against the couple devoted to the lawyers ; "the malt is the best in England, but the beer is bad." In this I cannot concur. To me they repre- sent the grinning gargoyles and grotesque carvings of the Gothic cathedral ; the " noble grotesque " of Ruskin, the sport of a strong and earnest, not the serious business of a weak and frivolous mind. In the passage from which I have already quoted, Mr. Swinburne, referring to such pieces as the two Guidos, writes : " This work of exposition by soliloquy, and apology by'analysis, can only be accomplished or under- taken by the genius of a great special pleader, able to fling himself with all his heart and all his brain, with all the force of his intellect and all the strength of his imagination, into the assumed part of his client ; to concentrate on the cause in hand his whole power of illustration and illumination, and bring to bear upon one point at once all the rays of his thought in one focus." But what infinite contempt, genial and jolly in the first case, acrid in the other, Browning pours out upon these professional hireling special pleaders ! His own object in such pieces as " Bishop Blougram's Apology," "Mr. Sludge, 'the Medium,'" the "Prince of Hohenstiel-Schwangau," is by no means to prove black white and white black, to make the worse appear the better reason, but to bring a seeming monster and
