to his country were historical; but Browning accentuates Pym’s heroism by making the man he sends to the scaffold his old friend; and devotion is the single trait of the beautiful but imaginary character of Lucy Carlisle.  “Give me your notion of a thorough self-devotement, self-forgetting,” he wrote a few years later to Miss Flower:  the idea seems to have been already busy moulding his still embryonic invention of character.  Something of the visionary exaltation of the dying Paracelsus thus hangs over the final scene in which Strafford goes to meet the fate which the one friend imposes on him and the other cannot turn aside.  All the characters have something of the “deep self-consciousness” of the author of Pauline.  Not that they are, any of them, drawn with very profound grasp of human nature or a many-sided apprehension of life.  They are either absolutely simple, like Lady Carlisle, or built upon a rivalry or conflict of simple elements, like Strafford and Charles; but there is so much restless vivacity in their discourse, the broad surface of mood is so incessantly agitated by the play and cross-play of thought and feeling, that they seem more complex than they are.

Though played for only five nights, Strafford had won a success which might well have dazzled a young and untried aspirant, and which was sufficiently impressive to shrewd men of business like Messrs Longman to induce them to undertake its publication free of cost.  It appeared in April, with an interesting preface, subsequently withdrawn, from which a significant sentence has already been quoted.  The composition of Strafford had not only “freshened a jaded mind” but permanently quickened his zest for the drama of political crises.  New projects for historical dramas chased and jostled one another through his busy brain, which seems to have always worked most prosperously in a highly charged atmosphere.  I am going “to begin ... thinking a Tragedy,” he wrote characteristically to Miss Haworth—­“(an Historical one, so I shall want heaps of criticisms on Strafford), and I want to have another tragedy in prospect; I write best so provided."[16]

[Footnote 16:  Orr, Life, p. 103.]

The “Historical Tragedies” here foreshadowed, King Victor and King Charles and The Return of the Druses, were eventually published as the Second and Fourth of the Bells and Pomegranates, in 1842-43.  How little Browning cared for history except as a quarry for psychical problems, how little concern he had at bottom with the changing drama of national life, is clear from the directions in which he now sought his good.  In Strafford as in Paracelsus, and even in Sordello, the subject had made some appeal to the interest in great epochs and famous men.  Henceforth his attitude, as a dramatist, to history is a curious blend of the historical specialist who explores the recondite byways of history, and the romantic poet who abandons actuality