He believes that the girl whom he has loved and honoured all his life, whose purity was as a star to him, will accept Mertoun while she was sinning with another! He should have felt that this was incredible, and immediately understood, as Guendolen does, that her lover and Mertoun were the same.

Dulness and blindness so improbable are unfitting in a drama, nor does the passion of his overwhelming pride excuse him.

The central situation is a protracted irritation.

Browning was never a good hand at construction, even in his poems.

His construction is at its very worst in this drama.
But now, when we have, with wrath, accepted this revolting situation--which, of course, Browning made in order to have his tragic close, but which a good dramatist would have arranged so differently--we pass into the third act, the tragic close; and that is simple enough in its lines, quite naturally wrought out, beautifully felt, and of exquisite tenderness.