King Charles Emanuel, of Savoy (King Victor and King Charles), was the son of Victor Amadeus II., Duke of Savoy. He became king when his father suddenly abdicated, in 1730.
King Victor and King Charles: A Tragedy. (Bells and Pomegranates, II., 1842.) Victor Amadeus II., born in 1666, was Duke of Savoy. He obtained the kingdom of Sicily by treaty from Spain, which he afterwards exchanged with the Emperor for the island of Sardinia, with the title of King (1720). He was fierce, audacious, unscrupulous, and selfish, profound in dissimulation, prolific in resources, and a “breaker of vows both to God and man.” He was, however, an able and warlike monarch, and had the interests of his kingdom at heart. He was, moreover, beloved by the people over whom he ruled, and under his reign the country made great progress in finances, education, and the development of its natural resources. His whole reign was one of unexampled prosperity, and his life was a continued career of happiness until, in 1715, his beloved son Victor died. His daughter, the Queen of Spain, died shortly after. Charles Emanuel, his second son, had never been a favourite with the King. He was ill-favoured in appearance, and weak and vacillating in his conduct. When the Queen died, in 1728, Victor married Anna Teresa Canali, a widowed countess, whom he created Marchioness of Spigno. For some reasons or other which have never been satisfactorily explained, the King now decided to abdicate in favour of his son Charles Emanuel. He gave out that he was weary of the world and disgusted with affairs of State, and desired to live in retirement for the remainder of his days. It is more probable that his fiery and audacious temper, and his deceitfulness, dissimulation, and persistent endeavours to overreach the other powers with which he had intercourse, had involved him in difficulties of State policy from which he could only extricate himself by this grave step. Mr. Browning implies, in the preface to his tragedy, that his investigations of the memoirs and correspondence of the period had enabled him to offer a more reasonable solution of the difficulties connected with this strange episode in Italian history than any previous account has offered. When the King announced his intention to resign his crown, he was entreated by his people, his ministers and his son, to forego a project which every one thought would be prejudicial to the interests of the kingdom; but nothing would induce him to reconsider his decision, which he carried out with the completest ceremonial. After taking this step he retired with his wife to his castle at Chambéry; and, as might have been expected, he speedily grew weary of his seclusion. He had an attack of apoplexy, and when he recovered it was with faculties impaired and a temper readily irritated to outbursts of violent behaviour. The marchioness now began to suggest to him that he had done unwisely by resigning his crown; and, day by day, urged him to recover it. This was probably due to the desire she felt of being queen. He still remained on good terms with his son, who visited him at Chambéry; but he gave him to understand that he was not satisfied with his management of affairs, and constantly intervened in their direction. In the summer of 1731 Charles, accompanied by his queen (Polyxena) visited his father at the baths of Eviano, and before his return home he received private intimation that his father was about to proceed to Turin to resume the crown he had resigned. He lost no time in returning home, which he reached just before his father and the marchioness. He visited the ex-king on the following day, when he was informed that his reason for returning to Turin was the necessity for seeking a climate more suitable to his present state of health. Charles was satisfied with the explanation, and placed the castle of Moncalieri at his father’s service: here the ex-king received his son’s ministers, and hints were dropped and threatening expressions used by Victor, which left little doubt as to his intentions on the minds of his audience. It now became necessary for King Charles to seriously consider the best means to secure himself and his queen from the effects of his father’s change of mind. Victor lost little time in declaring himself: on September 25th, 1731, he sent for the Marquis del Borgo, and ordered him to deliver up the deed by which he had resigned his crown. The minister evaded in his reply, and of course informed the King of the demand. Now it was that Charles was inclined to waver between his duty to his realm and his duty to his father. He was a good, obedient son, and of upright and generous disposition, and was inclined to yield to his father’s wishes. He called the chief officers of state around him, and laid the matter before them. They were not forgetful of the threats which the old king had recently used towards them, and the Archbishop of Turin had little difficulty in convincing them and the king that it was impossible to comply with his father’s demands. If anything were wanting to confirm them in their decision, it was forthcoming in the shape of news that the old king had demanded at midnight admittance into the fortress of Turin, but had been refused by the commander. The council of Charles Emanuel readily concurred in the opinion that Victor should be arrested. The Marquis d’Ormea, who had been the old king’s prime minister, was charged with the execution of the warrant of arrest. He proceeded, with assistance and appropriate military precautions, to carry out the order, entering the king’s apartments at Moncalieri. They captured the marchioness, who was hurried away screaming to a state prison at Ceva, with many of her relatives and supporters; and then secured the person of the old king. He was asleep, and when aroused and made acquainted with the mission of the intruders, he became violently excited, and had to be wrapped in the bedclothes and forced into one of the court carriages, which conveyed him to the castle of Rivoli, situated in a small town of five thousand inhabitants, near Turin. His attendants and guards were strictly ordered to say nothing to him: if he addressed them, they maintained an inflexible silence, merely by way of reply making a very low and submissive bow. He was afterwards permitted to have the company of his wife and to remove to another prison, but on October 31st, 1732, he died.
Laboratory, The: Ancien Regime. First appeared in Hood’s Magazine, June 1844, to which it was contributed to help Hood in his illness; afterwards published in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (Bells and Pomegranates, VII.) This poem and The Confessional were printed together, and entitled France and Spain. Mr. Arthur Symons reminds us that Rossetti’s first water-colour was an illustration of this poem, and has for subject and title the line “Which is the poison to poison her, prithee?” The keynote of the poem is jealousy, a distorted love-frenzy that impels to the rival’s extinction. The story is told in the most powerful and concentrated manner. The jealous woman’s whole soul is compressed into her words and actions; her emotion is visible; her voice, subdued yet full of energy, is audible in every line. The woman is a Brinvilliers, who has secured an interview with an alchemist in his laboratory, that she may purchase a deadly poison for her rival. We gather from the first verse that the poison consisted principally of arsenic. The “faint smokes curling whitely,” to protect the chemist from which it was necessary to wear a glass mask, sufficiently supplement our knowledge of the old poisoner’s art to enable us to indicate its nature. The patience of the woman, who in her eagerness for her rival’s death has no desire to hurry the manufacture of the means of it, is powerfully described. She is content to watch the chemist at his deadly work, asking questions in a dainty manner about the secrets of his art. She has all the ideas of “a big dose” which the uninitiated think requisite for big patients. “She’s not little—no minion like me!” “What, only a drop?” she asks. She is anxious to know if it hurts the victim. Is it likely to injure herself too? Reassured on that point, the glass mask is removed, and for reward the old man has all her jewels and gold to his fill. He may kiss her besides, and on the mouth if he will. There is a very remarkable instance in the second verse of the use made of antithesis by the poet. The proper emphasis can only be given when we rightly apprehend the ideas which oppose each other in the lines—
“He is with her, and they know that I know
Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow
While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear
Empty church, to pray God in, for them!—I am here.”
The antithesis of the several sets of ideas is the only safe guide to the emphasis—he as opposed to her, tears to laughter, me to them, the church to the laboratory.[1] Although the effects of some of the deadliest poisons were well known to the ancients, their detection and recovery from the body by chemical means is a branch of science of only modern discovery. The Greeks and Romans were well acquainted with mercury, arsenic, henbane, aconite and hemlock. The art of poisoning was brought to great perfection in India; but, though dissection of the living and the dead was practised by the Alexandrian School in the third century B.C., the Greek and Roman physicians were quite incapable of such a knowledge of pathology as would enable them to detect any but the coarsest signs of poisoning in a dead body. Much less were they able to detect or recover by analysis the particular poison used by the criminal. It is not surprising that, under such circumstances, professional poisoners usually escaped punishment. In the fourteenth century arsenic was generally employed. Of the great schools of poisoners which flourished in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Venice was the earliest. Troublesome people were removed by the Council of Ten by means of convenient poisons. Toffana and others combined poisoning with the art of cookery; and T. Baptist Porta, in his book on “Natural Magic,” under the section of cooking, shows that the trades of poisoner and cook were often combined. Toffana was the greatest of all the seventeenth-century poisoners. She made solutions of arsenic of various strengths, and sold them in phials under the name of “Naples Water” or “Acquetta di Napol.” It is said that she poisoned six hundred persons, including Popes Pius III. and Clement XIV. There was practically no fear of detection, and the liquid was sold openly to any one willing to pay the price for a deadly compound; the purpose for which it could alone be employed being perfectly well understood. Mr. Browning’s poem introduces us to a laboratory, where an arsenical preparation is being prepared. The glass mask refered to in the first line was used to protect the purchaser from the white, deadly smoke which the mineral gave off. The poison for which the lady paid so lavishly could be prepared nowadays by any chemist’s apprentice for a few pence; but, plentiful as it is, it is comparatively rarely used by criminals, as the same apprentice could infallibly detect it in the body after death, and reproduce in a test tube the very same poison used by the criminal.
Lady and the Painter, The. (Asolando: 1889.) A lady visiting an artist who has a picture on his easel of a nude female figure, protests against the irreverence to womanhood involved in his inducing a young woman to strip and stand stark-naked as his model. Before replying, he asks the lady what it is that clings half-savage-like around her hat. She, thinking he is admiring her headgear, tells him they are “wild-bird wings, and that the Paris fashion-books say that next year the skirts of women’s dresses are to be feathered too. Owls, hawks, jays and swallows are most in vogue.” Asking if he may speak plainly, and having been answered that he may, he tells Lady Blanche that it would be more to her credit to strip off all her bird-spoils and stand naked to help art, like his poor model, as a type of purest womanhood. “You, clothed with murder of His best of harmless beings, what have you to teach?” The poem is directed against the savage and wicked custom of wearing the plumage of birds, by which millions of God’s beautiful creatures are doomed annually to slaughter; by wearing gloves made of skins stripped from the living bodies of animals (if report be true); and by the use of sealskin and other animal coverings, which necessitates the wholesale slaughter of countless thousands of happy creatures in Arctic seas. I recently asked Miss Frances Power Cobbe—the noble lady who was a friend of Mr. Browning, and who has devoted her life and splendid literary talents to befriending dumb animals and protesting against cruelty in high places—to furnish me with some account of the agitation against the foolish habit of wearing bird-plumage in women’s bonnets. I have received from Miss Cobbe the following particulars: “The Plumage League began December 1885. It started with a letter in the Times, December 18th, 1885 (quoted in extenso in the Zoophilist, January 1886, p. 164), by the Rev. F. O. Morris, embodying one from Lady Mount Temple. Before May 1886 a long list of names (given in the Zoophilist) were given as patrons of the League, including Lady Mount Temple, Duchess of Sutherland, Lady Londesborough, Lady Sudeley, Hon. Mrs. R. C. Boyle, Louisa Marchioness of Waterford, Princess Christian, Lady Burdett Coutts, Lady Eastlake, Lady John Manners, Lady Tennyson, Lady Herbert of Lea, and about forty other ladies of rank. I should say that the League was originated by Lady Mount Temple and the Rev. F. O. Morris. There is another society in existence for the same purpose, working in London—the Birds’ Protection Society—one of whose local secretaries lately applied to me for a subscription.”
Lady Carlisle, Lucy Percy. (Strafford.) She was the daughter of the ninth Earl of Northumberland, and did her utmost to save Strafford’s life.
Lapaccia. Mona Lapaccia was Fra Lippo Lippi’s aunt, the sister of his father, who brought him up till he was eight years old, when, being no longer able to maintain him, she took him to the Carmelite Convent.
La Saisiaz (A. E. S., Sept. 14th, 1877).—Mr. Browning was staying during the autumn of 1877, with his sister, amongst the mountains near Geneva, at a villa called “La Saisiaz,” which in the Savoyard dialect means “The Sun.” They were accompanied on this occasion by Miss Ann Egerton Smith. The happiness of the visit to this beautiful spot was marred by the sudden death of Miss Smith, from heart disease, on the night of September 14th. The poem is the result of the poet’s musings on death, God, the soul, and the future state. It is one of Mr. Browning’s noblest and most beautiful utterances on the great questions of the Supreme Being and the ultimate destiny of the soul of man. It is Theism of the loftiest kind, and the grounds on which it is based are as philosophical as they are poetically expressed. The work has often been compared with the In Memoriam of Tennyson. The powerful optimism, the robust confidence and devout faith in the infinite love and wisdom of the Supreme Being, are in each poem emphasized again and again. After several pages of description of the scenery of the locality, Mr. Browning imagines that a spirit of the place bade him question, and promised answer, of the problems of existence—