Some years before his death Browning promised to leave the Old Yellow Book, together with other books and manuscripts, to Balliol College, Oxford, and his son carried out the promise soon after the poet's decease. The Carnegie Institution of Washington, D. C., has reproduced the entire book in photo-facsimile, with translation and editing by Charles W. Hodell. The Publishers gratefully acknowledge the kindness and generosity of the Institution in allowing the translation of the Yellow Book to be reproduced in the present volume. They have also to acknowledge their indebtedness to Professor Hodell for the courtesy he has shown, and the great help he has given in editing these volumes. Hitherto the work has been practically inaccessible to British readers, and in its new dress it is hoped it will be found invaluable in interpreting the greatest work of Robert Browning.
INTRODUCTION
The Old Yellow Book is a soiled and bloody page from the criminal annals of Rome two centuries ago, saved apparently by mere chance for the one great artist of modern literature who could best use it, and who has raised this record of a forgotten crime to a permanent place in that ideal world of man's creation where Caponsacchi and Pompilia have joined the company of Paolo and Francesca, of the Red Cross Knight, of Imogen, of Marguerite and Faust, and of Don Quixote.
One June day of 1860, Robert Browning passed from the Casa Guidi home to enjoy the busy life of Florence. There, "pushed by the hand ever above my shoulder," he entered the Piazza of San Lorenzo:
crammed with booths, Buzzing and blaze, noontide and market-time.
He had brought home from such wanderings many a rare old tapestry, or picture, or carving from the long artistic past of the city. This day his eye caught the soiled, vellum-covered volume, crowded between its insignificant neighbours. "One glance at the lettered back," declares the poet, "and Stall! a lira made it mine." All the way home and all day long, he pored over these pages, until by nightfall he had so mastered the facts of the case that the whole tragedy lay plain before his mind's eye.
The book led him, and leads us, back to the morning of January 3, 1698, when all Rome was astir with the sensation of a brutal assassination. The aged Comparini, cut to pieces in their own home in the very heart of Rome on the evening before by a band of assassins, were now exposed to the view of an excited mob of the curious and idle. Pompilia, desperately wounded, lay a-dying. A police captain and posse were in pursuit of the criminals, one of whom was a nobleman who had held office in the household of one of the great cardinals. Toward night the criminals were brought back to the city, and were followed through the streets to the prison doors by a great throng.
Just seven weeks later and again Rome was throbbing with excitement. Unwonted crowds were pressing into the Piazza del Popolo, where gallows and scaffold had been prepared. At last, up the Corso filed the Brotherhood of Death with their black gowns and great cross, and behind them, in separate carts, the five criminals. In the midst of a sea of upturned faces Guido and his fellows met their end, and the curtain fell.
The Old Yellow Book is the record of the court procedure of those seven intervening weeks, and shows us the whole legal battle fought to save Guido, while Rome looked on with the fascinated interest which has always attended the great murder trials. It includes the lawyers' arguments for and against the accused, together with a part of the evidence brought into court, and some additional miscellaneous data on the case. All this had evidently been assembled by the Florentine lawyer, Cencini, to whom certain letters included are addressed. He seems to have been interested in the case as a precedent on an important and much disputed point of law, "whether and when a husband may kill an adulterous wife." Cencini may also have had some professional relation with the Franceschini family at Arezzo. At any rate, he set the material in order, provided title-page and index, and a transcript of the record in a criminal case against Pompilia in the Tuscan courts (pp. [5]-[7]), and bound it securely in the vellum cover which conveyed it to the poet's hands more than a century and a half later.