A thief, as Schiller said, can qualify for a tragic hero only by adding to his theft the more heroic crime of murder; but Browning's Elder Man compromises even the professional perfidies of a Don Juan with shady dealings at cards and the like which Don Juan himself would have scouted.

In _Fifine_ the Don Juan of tradition was lifted up into and haloed about with poetical splendours not his own; here he is depressed into an equally alien sorriness of prose.

But the decisive and commanding figure, for Browning and for his readers, is of course his victim and Nemesis, the Elder Lady.

She is as unlike Pompilia as he is unlike Guido; but we see not less clearly how the upleaping of the soul of womanhood in the child, under the stress of foul and cruel wrongs, has once more asserted its power over him.

And if Pompilia often recalls his wife, the situation of the Elder Lady may fairly remind us of that of Marion Erle in _Aurora Leigh_.