conspicuous by his eloquence. But when he denounced the chief of the
municipal force, and hinted that if the right man were in the right
place, that officer would be he, all the other "spare horses" rushed
upon him and he was obliged to run for his life. The first hiding-place
which presented itself was a sepulchre, in which a corpse had just been
laid. He squeezed himself into this, and crawled forth from it at at the
end of two days, starving, covered with vermin, and thoroughly converted
to the policy of living and letting live. The authentic part of the
narrative concludes with his admission into a neighbouring convent (the
Osservanza) where he was cleansed and fed. But Mr. Browning allows Fancy
the just employment of telling how the Superior improved the occasion,
and how his lesson was received.

"It is a great mistake," this reverend person assures his guest--though
one from which his own youth has not been free--"to imagine that any one
man can preach another out of his folly. If such endeavours could
succeed, heaven would have begun on earth. Whereas, every man's task is
to leaven earth with heaven, by working towards the end to which his
Master points, without dreaming that he can ever attain it. Man, in
short, is to be not the 'spare horse,' but the 'mill-horse' plodding
patiently round and round on the same spot."

And Pacchiarotto replies that his monitor's arguments are, by his own
account, doomed to be ineffectual: but that he is addressing himself to
one already convinced. He (Pacchiarotto) never was so by living man; but
he has been convinced by a dead one. That corpse has seemed to ask him
by its grin, why he should join it before his time because men are not
all made on the same pattern: "Because, above, one's Jack and
one--John." And the same grin has reminded him that this life is the
rehearsal, not the real performance: just an hour's trial of who is fit,