How little Browning cared for history except as a quarry for psychical problems, how little concern he had at bottom with the changing drama of national life, is clear from the directions in which he now sought his good.

In _Strafford_ as in _Paracelsus_, and even in _Sordello_, the subject had made some appeal to the interest in great epochs and famous men.

Henceforth his attitude, as a dramatist, to history is a curious blend of the historical specialist who explores the recondite byways of history, and the romantic poet who abandons actuality altogether.

He seeks his heroes in remote sequestered corners of the world,--Sardinia, Juliers, Lebanon; but actual historic research gradually yields ground to a free invention which, however, always simulates historic truth.
_King Victor and King Charles_ contains far less poetry than _Paracelsus_, but it was the fruit of historic studies no less severe.
There was material for genuine tragedy in the story.

The old king, who after fifty years of despotic rule shifts the crown to the head of his son with the intention of still pulling the wires behind the scenes, but, finding that Charles means to rule as well as reign, clutches angrily at his surrendered crown,--this King Victor has something in him of Lear, something of the dying Henry IV.