With King Charles of Sardinia it is duty to his people that summons him, from those modest and tranquil ways of life of which he dreamed, to the cares and toils of the crown.

He has strength to accept without faltering the burden that is laid upon him.

And if he falters at the last, and would resign to his father, who reclaims it, the crown which God alone should have removed, shall we assert confidently that Browning's dramatic instinct has erred?
The pity of it--that his great father, daring in battle, profound in policy, should stand before him an outraged, helpless old man, craving with senile greed a gift from his son--the pity of it revives an old weakness, an old instinct of filial submission, in the heart of Charles.

He has tasked himself without sparing; he has gained the affections of his subjects; he has conciliated a hostile Europe; is not this enough?
Or was it also in the bond that he should tread a miserable father into the dust?
The test again of Luigi, in the third part of _Pippa Passes_, is that of one who sees all the oppression of his people, who is enamoured of the antique ideal of liberty, and whose choice lies between a youth of luxurious ease and the virtue of one heroic crime, to be followed by the scaffold-steps, with youth cut short.

To him that overcometh and endureth unto the end will God give the morning-star: The gift of the morning-star! Have I God's gift Of the morning-star?
And Luigi will adventure forth--it may be in a kind of divine folly--as a doomsman commissioned by God to free his Italy.