and when the torch is clapt-to and he has “leapt back safe,” poking jests and gibes at the victim.  But through this distorting medium we see the soul of John himself, like a gleam-lit landscape through the whirl of a storm; a strange weird sinister thing, glimmering in a dubious light between the blasphemer we half see in him with the singer’s eyes and the saint we half descry with our own.  Of explicit pathos there is not a touch.  Yet how subtly the inner pathos and the outward scorn are fused in the imagery of these last stanzas:—­

     “Ha, ha, John plucketh now at his rose
        To rid himself of a sorrow at heart! 
      Lo,—­petal on petal, fierce rays unclose;
        Anther on anther, sharp spikes outstart;
      And with blood for dew, the bosom boils;
        And a gust of sulphur is all its smell;
      And lo, he is horribly in the toils
        Of a coal-black giant flower of hell!

      So, as John called now, through the fire amain,
        On the Name, he had cursed with, all his life—­
      To the Person, he bought and sold again—­
        For the Face, with his daily buffets rife—­
      Feature by feature It took its place: 
        And his voice, like a mad dog’s choking bark,
      At the steady whole of the Judge’s face—­
        Died.  Forth John’s soul flared into the dark.”

None of these dramatic studies of Christianity attracted so lively an interest as Bishop Blougram’s Apology. It was “actual” beyond anything he had yet done; it portrayed under the thinnest of veils an illustrious Catholic prelate familiar in London society; it could be enjoyed with little or no feeling for poetry; and it was amazingly clever.  Even Tennyson, his loyal friend but unwilling reader, excepted it, on the last ground, from his slighting judgment upon Men and Women at large.  The figure of Blougram, no less than his discourse, was virtually new in Browning, and could have come from him at no earlier time.  He is foreshadowed, no doubt, by a series of those accomplished mundane ecclesiastics whom Browning at all times drew with so keen a zest,—­by Ogniben, the bishop in Pippa Passes, the bishop of St Praxed’s.  But mundane as he is, he bears the mark of that sense of the urgency of the Christian problem which since Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day had so largely and variously coloured Browning’s work.  It occurred to none of those worldly bishops to justify their worldliness,—­it was far too deeply ingrained for that.  But Blougram’s brilliant defence, enormously disproportioned as it is to the insignificance of the attack, marks his tacit recognition of loftier ideals than he professes.  Like Cleon, he bears involuntary witness to what he repudiates.