BROWNING'S "PROSE ST RAFFORD."*

SURELY, among the most curious of the curiosities of litera- ture, is the fact—for fact it seems to be—that Robert Browning wrote "The Life of Strafford" which appeared in Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopedia in 1836, under the name of John Forster. Dr. Furnivall says that Browning three times

talked to him about it, and the second time told him the whole story : —

"One day he went to see Forster, and found him very ill, and anxious about The Life of Strafford,' which he had promised to write at once, to complete a volume of lives of eminent British statesmen. Forster had finished The Life of Eliot '—the first in the volume—and had just begun that of Strafford, for which he had made full collections and extracts ; but illness came on, he couldn't work, the book ought to be completed forthwith, as it was due in the serial issue of volumes ; what was he to do ?

said Browning, 'don't trouble about it. I'll take your papers, and do it for you.' Forster thanked his young friend heartily. Browning put the Strafford papers under his arm, walked off, worked hard, finished the life, and it came out to time in 1836, to Forster's great relief, and passed under his name."

As Professor Gardiner agrees with Dr. Furnivall in thinking that the book is Browning's, and not Forster's, we may well accept Browning's authorship as an established fact. Support is derived for it from the fact that when Macready wrote, in May, 1836, to ask Browning to write him a play, he at once suggested Strafford.

• _Robert Broto4o9'a Pros& Gifo of Strafford.. Forewords by F. .1. Furnivall, London: Kogan Paul, Trench, Trabner, and Co.

More potent is internal evidence. Dr. Furnivall quotes a fine passuge in the conclusion of the book, which is almost decisive in itself :—

" A great lesson is written in the life of this truly extraordinary person. In him despotism had at length obtained an instrument with mind to comprehend and resolution to act upon her principles in their length and breadth—and enough of her purposes were effected by him to enable mankind to see, ' as from a tower, the end of all.' I cannot discern one false step in Strafford's public conduct, one glimpse of a recognition of an alien principle, one instance of a dereliction of the law of his being which can come in to dispute the decisive result of the experiment, or explain away its failure. The least vivid fancy will have no difficulty in taking up the interrupted design, and by wholly enfeebling or materially emboldening the insignificant nature of Charles ; and by according some half-dozen years of immunity to the fretted tenement' of Strafford's fiery soul,—contemplate, then, for itself the perfect realisation of the scheme of making the prince the most absolute lord in Christendom.' That done, let it pursue the same course with respect to Eliot's noble imaginings, or to young Vane's dreamy aspirings, and apply in like manner a fit machinery to the working out the projects which made the dungeon of the one a holy place, and sustained the other in his self-imposed exile. The result is great and decisive ! It establishes in renewed force those principles of political conduct which have endured, and must con- tinue to endure, like truth from age to age.' "

Surely this is admirable ; but it is not Forster. Yet the peroration might be Browning and the body of the book Forster. It is not so, however. Almost every page contains passages informed by Browning's spirit and inspired by his genius. Like the traveller in Horace, at almost every step the reader finds that he treads through the outer cinders of prose, to find the imaginative fire glowing beneath.

Even such a casual sentence as the following bears the mark of the imaginative genius,—not of the laboured, the official style which characterises Dryasdust in general, and Mr.

Forster in particular :—

"There would be little hazard in supposing that their lord- ships of Ely and Cork were indebted to the extraordinary letter, from which I shall quote the opening passages, for the strongest sensation their official lives had known."

This is a passage chosen at random. Dr. Furnivall has col- lected in his preface the most characteristic bits of all, such

as :—

" Pleasure was a Silenus in the Court of James. In that of Charles IL it was a vulgar satyr. Under Charles I. it was still of the breed, but it was a god Pan, and the muses piped among his nymphs:" From all which the reader may conclude that Browning's Prose Life of Strafford is excellent reading. So it is. Indeed, if Dr. Furnivall would not burn one for saying so, it is far better reading than Strafford: a Tragedy. Browning was the first person who threw off the traditional view of Strafford as "the Great Apostate." Apostate, of course, he was, in the verbal sense that every one who leaves a party with which he has acted is an apostate. And it was undoubtedly un- fortunate for Strafford's reputation that he deserted the popular party when it was at its nadir, and was immediately gazetted, as we should say, Lord President of the Council of the North. But Browning shows, and every one of any importance as a

historical writer has followed him since,—that the apostacy, if there was any, took place when he joined the popular party, not when he left it. His prepossessions, his prejudices, his considered principles, were in favour of absolute power and despotism. But, of course, in a man of Strafford's ambitions and overbearing nature, the absolute power must be exercised by or through himself, or it was not the right sort. The favourite Buckingham thwarted Strafford's ambition ; he had the talent at least to see what a dangerous rival he would admit, if he let Strafford " into the Cabinet " to talk in modern phrase. While, therefore, the power of the favourite lasted, Strafford went into Opposition. But it was a very measured and marked kind of Opposition. It was perfectly framed to combine attacks on the Administration with adulation of the Monarch, and in its most liberal outbursts, always hinted at the method of reconciliation. Its burden to the King always was: "See what a friend you might have if you would not treat him as an enemy." When once he was given the position of the representative of Royalty in his own county of Yorkshire, which his family pride and personal sense of superiority alike pointed out as his due, he never swerved from his loyalty to the principle he worshipped, and he threw unequalled zeal and devotion into the struggle with demo- cracy, personified to him in his personal hatred and contempt of the " Prynnes and Pyms and all that rabble of odd names and natures." His political principles were but the outcome of the aristocratic insolence of his nature exhibited quite as much in his treatment of his younger brothers and sisters and of his third wife, as in his conduct to young Ballads in Yorkshire, and to everybody in his Irish Viceroyalty. His greatness consists in this, that while others held the same opinions and had the same feelings, few or none have ever carried them into practice with the same courage, the same determination, the same ability, or equal unscrupulousness.