Yet it is incurably weak in the motives which determine the action; and certain passages are almost ludicrously undramatic.

If Romeo before he flung up his ladder of ropes had paused, like Mertoun, to salute his mistress with a tenor morceau from the opera, it is to be feared that runaways' and other eyes would not have winked, and that old Capulet would have come upon the scene in his night-gown, prepared to hasten the catastrophe with a long sword.

Yet _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, with its breadth of outline, its striking situations, and its mastery of the elementary passions--love and wrath and pride and pity--gives us assurance that Browning might have taken a place of considerable distinction had he been born in an age of great dramatic poetry.

If it is weak in construction so--though in a less degree--are Webster's _Duchess of Malfi_, and Shakespeare's _Cymbeline_.
In _King Victor and King Charles_ Browning adopted, and no doubt deliberately, a plain, unfigured and uncoloured style, as suiting both the characters and the historical subject.

The political background of this play and that of _Strafford_ hardly entitles either drama to be named political.