Some one had remarked that it was "a natural sequence that the guard should be heard coming to take Norbert to his doom." "'Now I don't quite think that,' answered Browning, _as if he were following out the play as a spectator_.

'The queen has a large and passionate temperament....

She would have died by a knife in her heart.

The guard would have come to carry away her dead body.'" The catastrophe here suggested is undoubtedly far finer tragedy.

But we cannot believe that this was what Browning originally meant to happen.