ABSTRACT
This chapter considers one aspect of Browning's villains. One broad distinction between them is this, that while Count Guido is represented as singularly devoid of wit or humour of any sort, the acute old rascal of the Inn Album, and is thoroughly alive to a sense of the ludicrous. The chapter looks at broadly speaking; Browning's evil men and women belong to a class from which Shakspere's treatment of his Iago and his Lear's elder daughters excludes them. The vagabond Bluphocks shows to rather as a tool in the hands of a wicked man, than as a villain prompted by any evil motives of his own. The chapter suggests to any Browning-student a further examination than able to attempt of those apparent anomalies in his writings, which to the author's mind do seem to resolve themselves into law. In all literary criticism, even true views of one aspect of a writer's work require the corrective of counterpart views of truth.
