Far from being a vital element in the action, like the recital of the _Alkestis_, the reading of the _Hercules Furens_ is an almost gratuitous diversion in the midst of the talk; and the tameness of a literal (often awkwardly literal) translation is rarely broken by those inrushes of alien genius which are the glory of Browning's _Alkestis_.

Yet the very self-restraint sprang probably from Browning's deep sensibility to the pathos of the story.

"Large tears," as Mrs Orr has told us, fell from his eyes, and emotion choked his voice, when he first read it aloud to her.
The _Inn Album_ is, like _Red-cotton Night-cap Country_, a versified novel, melodramatic in circumstances, frankly familiar in scenery and atmosphere.

Once more, as in the _Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, and in _James Lee's Wife_, Browning turned for his "incidents in the development of souls" to the passion and sin-frayed lives of his own countrymen.

But no halo of seventeenth-century romance here tempers the sordid modernity of the facts; the "James Lee" of this tragedy appears in person and is drawn with remorseless insistence on every mean detail which announces the "rag-and-feather hero-sham." Everything except his wit and eloquence is sham and shabby in this Club-and-Country-house villain, who violates more signally than any figure in poetic literature the canon that the contriver of the tragic harms must not be totally despicable.