Caliban tremblingly does his best to hitch his waggon to Setebos's star--when Setebos is looking; Sludge is convinced that the stars are once for all hitched to his waggon; that heaven is occupied in catering for his appetite and becoming an accomplice in his sins.
Sludge's spiritual world was genuine for him, but it had nothing but the name in common with that of the poet of Ben Ezra, and of the _Epilogue_ which immediately follows.[44] [Footnote 44: The foregoing account assumes that the poem was not written, as is commonly supposed, in Florence in 1859-60, but after his settlement in London.

The only ground for the current view is Mrs Browning's mention of his having been "working at a long poem" that winter (_Letters_, May 18, 1860).

I am enabled, by the kindness of Prof.
Hall Griffin, to state that an unpublished letter from Browning to Buchanan in 1871 shows this "long poem" to have been one on Napoleon III.

(cf.

above, p.