Elvire, with her eloquent silences and wistful pathos, is an exquisite creation,--a wedded sister of Shakespeare's Hero; Fifine, too, with her strutting bravado and "pose half frank, half fierce," shrills her discordant note vivaciously enough.

The principal speaker himself is the most complex of Browning's casuists, a marvellously rich and many-hued piece of portraiture.

This Juan is deeply versed in all the activities of the imagination which he so eloquently defends.

Painting and poetry, science and philosophy, are at his command; above all, he is an artist and a poet in the lore of Love.
It is easy to see that the kind of adventure on which Juan claims the right of projecting his imagination has close affinities with the habitual procedure of Browning's own.

Juan defends his dealings with the gay fizgig Fifine as a step to the fuller appreciation of Elvire; he demands freedom to escape only as a means of possessing more surely and intimately what he has.