Count Guide Franceschini is not a miracle of evil rendered credible, like Shakespeare's Iago, nor a strange enormity of tyrannous hate and lust like the Count Cenci of Shelley.

He has no spirit of diabolic revelry in crime; no feeling for its delicate artistry; he is under no spell of fascination derived from its horror.
He is clumsy in his fraud and coarse in his violence.

Sin may have its strangeness in beauty; but Guido does not gleam with the romance of sin.
If Browning once or twice gives his fantasy play, it is in describing the black cave of a palace at Arezzo into which the white Pompilia is borne, the cave and its denizens--the "gaunt gray nightmare" of a mother, mopping and mowing in the dusk, the brothers, "two obscure goblin creatures, fox-faced this, cat-clawed the other," with Guido himself as the main monster.

Yet the Count, short of stature, "hook-nosed and yellow in a bush of beard" is not a monster but a man; possessed of intellectual ability and a certain grace of bearing when occasion requires; although wrenched and enfeebled by the torture of the rack he holds his ground, has even a little irony to spare, and makes a skilful defence.

Browning does not need a lithe, beautiful, mysterious human panther, and is content with a plain, prosaic, serviceable villain, who would have been disdained by the genius of the dramatist Webster as wanting in romance.