And just as we should, if we took Browning seriously as a poet, see that he had made many noble literary forms, so we should also see that he did make from time to time certain definite literary mistakes.

There is one of them, a glaring one, in _Pippa Passes_; and, as far as I know, no critic has ever thought enough of Browning as an artist to point it out.

It is a gross falsification of the whole beauty of _Pippa Passes_ to make the Monseigneur and his accomplice in the last act discuss a plan touching the fate of Pippa herself.

The whole central and splendid idea of the drama is the fact that Pippa is utterly remote from the grand folk whose lives she troubles and transforms.

To make her in the end turn out to be the niece of one of them, is like a whiff from an Adelphi melodrama, an excellent thing in its place, but destructive of the entire conception of Pippa.