1. 'Strafford,' written in 1836, when its author was twenty-four years old, and put upon the boards of Covent Garden Theatre on the 1st of May, 1837; Macready playing Strafford, and Miss Helen Faucit Lady Carlisle. It was received with much enthusiasm, but the company was rebellious and the manager bankrupt; and after running five nights, the man who played Pym threw up his part, and the theatre was closed.
2. 'Pippa Passes.'
3. 'King Victor and King Charles.'
4. 'The Return of the Druses.'
5. 'A Blot in the 'Scutcheon.'
This beautiful and pathetic play was put on the stage of Drury Lane on the 11th of February, 1843, with Phelps as Lord Tresham, Miss Helen Faucit as Mildred Tresham, and Mrs. Stirling, still known to us all, as Guendolen. It was a brilliant success. Mr. Browning was in the stage-box; and if it is any satisfaction for a poet to hear a crowded house cry "Author, author!" that satisfaction has belonged to Mr. Browning. The play ran several nights; and was only stopped because one of Mr. Macready's bankruptcies happened just then to intervene. It was afterwards revived by Mr. Phelps, during his "memorable management" of Sadlers' Wells.
6. 'Colombe's Birthday.' Miss Helen Faucit put this upon the stage in 1852, when it was reckoned a success.
7. 'Luria.'
8. 'A Soul's Tragedy.'
To call any of these plays unintelligible is ridiculous; and nobody who has ever read them ever did, and why people who have not read them should abuse them is hard to see. Were society put upon its oath, we should be surprised to find how many people in high places have not read 'All's Well that Ends Well,' or 'Timon of Athens'; but they don't go about saying these plays are unintelligible. Like wise folk, they pretend to have read them, and say nothing. In Browning's case they are spared the hypocrisy. No one need pretend to have read 'A Soul's Tragedy'; and it seems, therefore, inexcusable for any one to assert that one of the plainest, most pointed and piquant bits of writing in the language is unintelligible. But surely something more may be truthfully said of these plays than that they are comprehensible. First of all, they are plays, and not works--like the dropsical dramas of Sir Henry Taylor and Mr. Swinburne. Some of them have stood the ordeal of actual representation; and though it would be absurd to pretend that they met with that overwhelming measure of success our critical age has reserved for such dramatists as the late Lord Lytton, the author of 'Money,' the late Tom Taylor, the author of 'The Overland Route,' the late Mr. Robertson, the author of 'Caste,' Mr. H. Byron, the author of 'Our Boys,' Mr. Wills, the author of 'Charles I.,' Mr. Burnand, the author of 'The Colonel,' and Mr. Gilbert, the author of so much that is great and glorious in our national drama; at all events they proved themselves able to arrest and retain the attention of very ordinary audiences. But who can deny dignity and even grandeur to 'Luria,' or withhold the meed of a melodious tear from 'Mildred Tresham'? What action of what play is more happily conceived or better rendered than that of 'Pippa Passes'?--where innocence and its reverse, tender love and violent passion, are presented with emphasis, and yet blended into a dramatic unity and a poetic perfection, entitling the author to the very first place amongst those dramatists of the century who have labored under the enormous disadvantage of being poets to start with.