His speech is a tissue of falsehoods and prevarications:  if he uses a fact, it is only to twist it into a form of self-justification.  He knows it is useless to deny the murder; his aim, then, is to explain and excuse it.  Every device attainable by the instinct and the brain of hunted humanity he finds and uses.  Now he slurs rapidly over an inconvenient fact; now, with the frank audacity of innocence, proclaims and blazons it abroad; now he is rhetorically eloquent, now ironically pathetic; always contriving to shift the blame upon others, and to make his own course appear the only one plausible or possible, the only one possible, at least, to a high-born, law-abiding son of the Church.  Every shift and twist is subtly adapted to his audience of Churchmen, and the gradation of his pleading no less subtly contrived.  No keener and subtler special pleading has ever been written, in verse certainly, and possibly in lawyers’ prose; and it is poetry of the highest order of dramatic art.

Covering a narrower range, but still more significant within its own limits, the speech of Giuseppe Caponsacchi, the priest who assisted Pompilia in her flight to Rome (given now in her defence before the judges who have heard the defence of Guido) is perhaps the most passionate and thrilling piece of blank verse ever written by Browning.  Indeed, I doubt if it be an exaggeration to say that such fire, such pathos, such splendour of human speech, has never been heard or seen in English verse since Webster.  In tone and colour the monologue is quite new, exquisitely modulated to a surprising music.  The lighter passages are brilliant:  the eloquent passages full of a fine austerity; but it is in those passages directly relating to Pompilia that the chief greatness of the work lies.  There is in these appeals a quivering, thrilling, searching quality of fervid pathetic directness:  I can give no notion of it in words; but here are a few lines, torn roughly out of their context, which may serve in some degree to illustrate my meaning:—­

      “Pompilia’s face, then and thus, looked on me
      The last time in this life:  not one sight since,
      Never another sight to be!  And yet
      I thought I had saved her.  I appealed to Rome: 
      It seems I simply sent her to her death. 
      You tell me she is dying now, or dead;
      I cannot bring myself to quite believe
      This is a place you torture people in: 
      What if this your intelligence were just
      A subtlety, an honest wile to work
      On a man at unawares?  ’Twere worthy you. 
      No, Sirs, I cannot have the lady dead! 
      That erect form, flashing brow, fulgurant eye,
      That voice immortal (oh, that voice of hers!)
      That vision of the pale electric sword
      Angels go armed with,—­that was not the last
      O’ the lady!  Come, I see through it, you find—­
      Know the manoeuvre!