serve to border Ottima's cloak. And if it be only this!"

"All service ranks the same with God--
With God, whose puppets, best and worst,
Are we: there is no last nor first." (vol. iii. p. 79.)

These are her last words as she lies down to sleep.

Pippa's songs are not impressive in themselves. They are made so in
every case by the condition of her hearer's mind; and the idea of the
story is obvious, besides being partly stated in the heroine's own
words. No man is "great" or "small" in the sight of God--each life being
in its own way the centre of creation. Nothing should be "great" or
"small" in the sight of man; since it depends on personal feeling, or
individual circumstance, whether a given thing will prove one or the
other.


"KING VICTOR AND KING CHARLES" is an historical tragedy in two divisions
and four parts, of which the time is 1730 and 31, and the place the
castle of Rivoli near Turin. The episode which it records may be read in
any chronicle of the period; and Mr. Browning adds a preface, in which
he justifies his own view of the characters and motives involved in it.
King Victor II. (first King of Sardinia) was sixty-four years old, and
had been nominally a ruler from the age of ten, when suddenly (1730) he
abdicated in favour of his son Charles. The Queen was dead, and he had
privately married a lady of the Court, to whom he had been long
attached; and the desire to acknowledge this union, combined with what
seems to have been a premature old age, might sufficiently have
explained the abdication; but Mr. Browning adopts the idea, which for a