In restating the incident of the glove Browning brings into play his casuistry, but casuistry is here used to justify a passion which the poet approves, to elucidate, not to obscure, what he represents as the truth of the situation.

_The Flight of the Duchess_ in part took its rise "from a line, 'Following the Queen of the Gipsies, O!'-- the burden of a song, which the poet, when a boy, heard a woman singing on a Guy Fawkes' day." Some two hundred lines were given to Hood for his magazine, at a time when Hood needed help, and death was approaching him.

The poem was completed some months later.

It is written, like _The Glove_, in verse that runs for swiftness' sake, and that is pleased to show its paces on a road rough with boulder-like rhymes.

The little Duchess is a wild bird caged in the strangely twisted wirework of artificial modes and forms.