"PARLEYINGS WITH CERTAIN PEOPLE OF IMPORTANCE IN THEIR DAY."

This volume occupies, even more than its predecessor, a distinctive position in Mr. Browning's work. It does not discard his old dramatic methods, but in a manner it inverts them; Mr. Browning has summoned his group of men not for the sake of drawing their portraits, but that they might help him to draw his own. It seems as if the accumulated convictions which find vent in the "parleyings" could no longer endure even the form of dramatic disguise; and they appear in them in all the force of direct reiterated statement, and all the freshness of novel points of view. And the portrait is in some degree a biography; it is full of reminiscences. The "people" with whom Mr. Browning parleys, important in their day, virtually unknown in ours, are with one exception his old familiar friends: men whose works connect themselves with the intellectual sympathies and the imaginative pleasures of his very earliest youth. The parleyings are:

I."With Bernard de Mandeville."
II."With Daniel Bartoli."
III."With Christopher Smart."
IV."With George Bubb Dodington."
V."With Francis Furini."
VI."With Gerard de Lairesse."
VII."With Charles Avison."

They are enclosed between a Prologue and an Epilogue both dramatic and fanciful, but scarcely less expressive of the author's mental personality than the body of the work.

In "Apollo and the Fates" the fanciful, or rather fantastic element preponderates. It represents Apollo as descending into the realms of darkness and pleading with the Fate Sisters for the life of Admetus, the thread of which Atropos is about to clip; and shows how he obtained for him a conditional reprieve by intoxicating the sisters with wine. The sequel to this incident has been given in Mr. Browning's transcript from "Alkestis"; and the present poem is introduced by references to that work of Euripides, to the "Eumenides" of Æschylus and to Homer's "Hymn to Mercury": the general sense of the passages indicated being this:—

Euripides.—"Admetus—whom, cheating the fates, I saved from death."