There were three books in each volume.

And if readers desire to realise fully the intellectual _tour de force_ contained in telling the same story twelve times over, and making each telling interesting, they cannot do better than read the book as Browning wished it to be read.

"Give the poem four months, and let ten days elapse between the reading of each book," is what he meant us to understand.

Moreover, to meet this possible weariness, Browning, consciously, or probably unconsciously, since genius does the right thing without asking why, continually used a trick of his own which, at intervals, stings the reader into wakefulness and pleasure, and sends him on to the next page refreshed and happy.

After fifty, or it may be a hundred lines of somewhat dry analysis, a vivid illustration, which concentrates all the matter of the previous lines, flashes on the reader as a snake might flash across a traveller's dusty way: or some sudden description of an Italian scene in the country or in the streets of Rome enlivens the well-known tale with fresh humanity.