_Colombe's Birthday_ has a joyous ending, but the joy is very grave and earnest, and the body of the play is made up of serious pleadings and serious hopes and fears.

There is no light-hearted mirth, no real gaiety of temper anywhere in the dramas of Browning.

Pippa's gladness in her holiday from the task of silk-winding is touched with pathos in the thought that what is so bright _is_ also so brief, and it is encompassed, even within delightful Asolo, by the sins and sorrows of the world.

Bluphocks, with his sniggering wit and his jingles of rhyme is a vagabond and a spy, who only covers the shame of his nakedness with these rags of devil-may-care good spirits.

The genial cynicism of Ogniben is excellent of its kind, and pleases the palate like an olive amid wines; but this man of universal intellectual sympathies is at heart the satirist of moral illusions, the unmasker of self-deception, who with long experience of human infirmities, has come to chuckle gently over his own skill in dealing with them; and has he not--we may ask--wound around his own spirit some of the incurable illusions of worldly wisdom?
No--this is not gaiety; if Browning smiles with his Ogniben, his smile is a comment upon the weakness and the blindness of the self-deceiver.
Browning's tragedies are tragedies without villains.