He went with the hypocrite and had mercy on the Pharisee.
How little this desire of Browning's, to look for a moment at the man's life with the man's eyes, was understood, may be gathered from the criticisms on _Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, which, says Browning, "the Editor of the _Edinburgh Review_ calls my eulogium on the Second Empire, which it is not, any more than what another wiseacre affirms it to be, a scandalous attack on the old constant friend of England.
It is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for himself." In 1873 appeared _Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country_, which, if it be not absolutely one of the finest of Browning's poems, is certainly one of the most magnificently Browningesque.

The origin of the name of the poem is probably well known.

He was travelling along the Normandy coast, and discovered what he called "Meek, hitherto un-Murrayed bathing-places, Best loved of sea-coast-nook-full Normandy!" Miss Thackeray, who was of the party, delighted Browning beyond measure by calling the sleepy old fishing district "White Cotton Night-Cap Country." It was exactly the kind of elfish phrase to which Browning had, it must always be remembered, a quite unconquerable attraction.

The notion of a town of sleep, where men and women walked about in nightcaps, a nation of somnambulists, was the kind of thing that Browning in his heart loved better than _Paradise Lost_.

Some time afterwards he read in a newspaper a very painful story of profligacy and suicide which greatly occupied the French journals in the year 1871, and which had taken place in the same district.