These two men brilliantly misrepresent, not merely each other's cause, but their own cause.

The introduction of them is one of the finest and most artistic strokes in _The Ring and the Book_.
We can see the matter best by taking an imaginary parallel.

Suppose that a poet of the type of Browning lived some centuries hence and found in some _cause celebre_ of our day, such as the Parnell Commission, an opportunity for a work similar in its design to _The Ring and the Book_.

The first monologue, which would be called "Half-London," would be the arguments of an ordinary educated and sensible Unionist who believed that there really was evidence that the Nationalist movement in Ireland was rooted in crime and public panic.
The "Otherhalf-London" would be the utterance of an ordinary educated and sensible Home Ruler, who thought that in the main Nationalism was one distinct symptom, and crime another, of the same poisonous and stagnant problem.

The "Tertium Quid" would be some detached intellectual, committed neither to Nationalism nor to Unionism, possibly Mr.Bernard Shaw, who would make a very entertaining Browning monologue.