Browning, with astonishing want of insight, makes him do it here, and adds to it a foolish anger with his wife because she advises him against it.

And the reason he does it and is angry with his wife, is a merely sentimental one--a private, unreasoning, childish love of his father, such a love as Strafford is supposed to have for Charles I .-- the kind of love which intruded into public affairs ruins them, and which, being feeble and for an unworthy object, injures him who gives it and him who receives it.
Even as a study of characters, much more as a drama, this piece is a failure, and the absence of poetry in it is amazing.
* * * * * The Return of the Druses approaches more nearly to a true drama than its predecessors; it is far better written; it has several fine motives which are intelligently, but not dramatically, worked out; and it is with great joy that one emerges at last into a little poetry.

Browning, having more or less invented his subject, is not seduced, by the desire to be historical, to follow apparent instead of imaginative truth; nor are we wearied by his unhappy efforts to analyse, in disconnected conversations, political intrigue.

Things are in this play as the logic of imaginative passion wills, as Browning's conception drove him.

But, unfortunately for its success as a true drama, Browning doubles and redoubles the motives which impel his characters.