The most vivid of these sketches is Dominus Hyacinthus, the lawyer who defends Guido.

I do not know anything better done, and more amusingly, than this man and his household--a paternal creature, full of his boys and their studies, making us, in his garrulous pleasure, at home with them and his fat wife.

Browning was so fond of this sketch that he drew him and his boys over again in the epilogue.
These represent the episodical characters in this drama of life; and Browning has scattered them, as it were, behind the chief characters, whom sometimes they illustrate and sometimes they contrast.

Of these the whitest, simplest, loveliest is Pompilia, of whom I have already written.

The other chief characters are Count Guido and Giuseppe Caponsacchi; and to the full development of these two characters Browning gives all his powers.