And this again, it is scarcely necessary to say, was the ground-plan and motive of _The Ring and the Book_.
Browning had picked up the volume and partly planned the poem during his wife's lifetime in Italy.

But the more he studied it, the more the dimensions of the theme appeared to widen and deepen; and he came at last, there can be little doubt, to regard it definitely as his _magnum opus_ to which he would devote many years to come.

Then came the great sorrow of his life, and he cast about him for something sufficiently immense and arduous and complicated to keep his brain going like some huge and automatic engine.

"I mean to keep writing," he said, "whether I like it or not." And thus finally he took up the scheme of the Franceschini story, and developed it on a scale with a degree of elaboration, repetition, and management, and inexhaustible scholarship which was never perhaps before given in the history of the world to an affair of two or three characters.

Of the larger literary and spiritual significance of the work, particularly in reference to its curious and original form of narration, I shall speak subsequently.