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Notes. – Act I. Scudi: dollars. Act II.: Brutus the Elder: who conspired with Cassius against Julius Cæsar. “Dico vobis!” I tell you! “St. Nepomucene of Prague” == St. John Nepomucen of Prague (1383), martyr. He was an anchorite and an apostle. The Emperor Wenceslaus had him put to death because he refused to betray what the Empress had told him under the seal of confession. Ravenna: a very celebrated and very ancient city of North-east Italy. Its great historical importance began early in the fifth century, when Honorius transferred his court thither. From 402 to 476 A.D. Ravenna was the chief residence of the Roman emperors. It was subject to papal rulers in the period of this story. “Cur fremuere gentes?” (Psalm ii. 1): “Why do the heathen so furiously rage together?” Pontificial Legate: an ambassador sent by the Pope to the court of a foreign prince or state. “Western Lands”: The allusion is to the discovery of America and the treasures and curiosities brought by Columbus to Spain.

Speculative. (Asolando, 1889.) Could the inspirations and pure delights of the past return, and remain with some great souls who have learned the divine alchemy of turning to gold the pains and pleasures of earth’s old life, it would be for them all that lower minds seek in a new life in what they call heaven; the real heaven being a state, and not a place. Love has inspired the poem.

Spiritualism. Browning’s opinions on this subject are to be found in his poem Mr. Sludge the Medium.

Spring Song. The poem commencing was published under the title of “Spring Song” in the New Amphion, 1886. In 1887 it was published at the end of Gerard de Lairesse in the “Parleyings” volume.

 
“Dance, yellows and whites and reds!”
 

Statue and the Bust, The. The Riccardi Palace in Florence is the scene of the story told in this poem. A lady who has just been married to the head of the noble Riccardi house notices one who rides past her window with a “royal air.” The bridesmaids whisper that it is the great Duke Ferdinand; who in his turn directs his glance at the bride the head of the house of Riccardi had that day brought home. As he looked at the woman and she at the man, her past was a sleep – her life that day only began. That night there was a feast in the house of the bride, and the Grand Duke was present. The lovers stood face to face a minute. In accordance with the courtly custom of the time, he was privileged to kiss the bride. Whether a word was spoken or not cannot be said. The husband, who stood by, however, saw or heard something which mortally offended him; and when, at night, he led his bride to her chamber, he told her calmly that the door which was then shut on her was closed till her body should be taken thence for burial. She could watch the world from the window, which faced the east, but could never more pass the door. The bride as calmly assented:

 
“Your window and its world suffice,”
 

she said. It would be easy, she thought, to fly to the Duke, who loved her: it would only be necessary to disguise herself as a page, and she would save her soul. She reflected, however, that next day her father was to bless her new condition; and she must tarry for a day, consoling herself with the reflection that she should certainly see the Duke ride past. And so she turned on her side, and went to sleep. That night the Duke resolved to ruin body and soul, if need might be, for the sake of this beautiful woman; and on the morrow he addressed the bridegroom, whose duties at court brought him into his presence, suggesting that he, with his wife, should visit him at his country seat at Petraja. The bridegroom quietly declined the invitation, giving as his reason that the state of his lady’s health did not permit her to quit the palace, the wind from the Apennines being particularly dangerous for her. The Duke was foiled in his project; but promised himself it should not be long before he met the bride again, yet he must wait a night, for the envoy from France was to visit him. He too reflects that he shall see the lady as he rides past her palace. They saw each other, and each resolved that next day they would do more than glance at a distance; but next day and the next passed, and as constantly was the project of union deferred; the weeks grew months, the years passed by, till age crept on, and each perceived they had been dreaming. One day the lady had to confess that her beauty was fading: her hair was tinged with grey, her mouth was puckered, and she was haggard-cheeked; and as she beheld herself in her glass she bade her servants call a famous sculptor to fix the remains of her beauty, so that it should no more fade. Della Robbia must make her a face on her window waiting, as ever, to watch her lover pass in the square below. But long before the artist’s work was finished, and the cornice in its place, the Duke had sighed over the escape of his own youth; and he too set John of Douay to make an equestrian statue of him, and to place it in the square he had crossed so often, so that men should admire him when he had gone to his tomb. The figure looks straight at one of the windows of the Riccardi Palace: the attitude suggests love for the lady and contempt of her husband. In connection with all this the poet reflects on the condition of the spirits of these two awaiting the Last Judgment. Do they reflect on the greatness of the gift of life – how they had seen the proper object of their lives, and yet had missed it? “But,” the poet hears us object, “their end was a crime, and delay was best.” The test, however, of our use of life can be as well attained by a crime as a virtue. A game can be played without money: where a button answers, it would be vain to use a sovereign. Whether we play with counters or coins, we must do our best to win: —

 
“If you choose to play! – is my principle,
Let a man contend to the uttermost
For his life’s set prize, be it what it will.”
 

These people as surely lost their counter as if it were lawful coin. This moral has been much disputed by Browning students. So far as society was concerned the lady and the Duke did well: so far as their own souls were concerned they undoubtedly did ill. The Duke would have been more manly and the woman truer to her human instincts if he and she had let love have its way. Both dwarfed and withered their souls by looking and longing and pining for what they had not courage to grasp. The sin in each case was as great in the sight of God. It was simply prudence and conventionality which restrained the lovers; and these things count for nothing with the poet-psychologist. But conventionality counts for a great deal in our conduct of life. It may have been “the crowning disaster to miss life” for the man and woman: if so, it was a sacrifice justly due to human society. If every woman flew to the arms of the man whom she liked better than her own husband, and if every governor of a city felt himself at liberty to steal another man’s wife merely to complete and perfect the circle of his own delights, society would soon be thrown back into barbarism. The sacrifice to conventionality and the self-restraint these persons practised may have atoned for much that was defective in their lives. “Pecca fortiter” (sin bravely), said Luther; but it would be difficult to defend the doctrine on any principle of ethics. Many readers have found difficulties in understanding this poem. One such wrote to an American paper to inquire: “(1) When, how, and where did it happen? Browning’s divine vagueness lets one gather only that the lady’s husband was a Riccardi. (2) Who was the lady? who the Duke? (3) The magnificent house where Florence lodges her Préfet is known to all Florentine ball-goers as the Palazzo Riccardi. It was bought by the Riccardi from the Medici in 1659. From none of its windows did the lady gaze at her more than royal lover. From what window, then, if from any? Are the statue and the bust still in their original positions?” These queries fell into the hands of Mr. Wise, who forwarded them to Mr. Browning, who sent the following answer: – “Jan. 8th, ’87. Dear Mr. Wise, – I have seldom met with such a strange inability to understand what seems the plainest matter possible. ‘Ball-goers’ are probably not history readers; but any guide-book would confirm what is sufficiently stated in the poem. I will append a note or two, however. (1) ‘This story the townsmen tell’: ‘when, how, and where’ constitutes the subject of the poem. (2) The lady was the wife of Riccardi, and the Duke – Ferdinand, just as the poem says. (3) As it was built by and inhabited by the Medici till sold, long after, to the Riccardi, it was not from the Duke’s palace, but a window in that of the Riccardi, that the lady gazed at her lover riding by. The statue is still in its place, looking at the window under which is ‘now the empty shrine.’ Can anything be clearer? My ‘vagueness’ leaves what to be ‘gathered’ when all these things are put down in black and white? Oh, ‘ball-goers’! – Yours very sincerely, Robert Browning.” The Medicean palace in the Via Larga, now called the Via Cavour, is meant as the duke’s palace. See articles on this question in Poet Lore, vol. iii., pp. 284 and 648. It is an error to suppose that but one palace is referred to in the poem. The Piazza della Annunziata in Florence is the square referred to in the first verse. The Church of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin was built in 1250, and adorned at the expense of Pietro de’ Medici from the designs of Michelozzi. The loggia of the church forms the north side. On the east is the Foundling Hospital, Spedale degli Innocenti, dating from the year 1421. In the centre of the square is an equestrian statue of Ferdinand I., cast from cannon taken by the Knights of St. Stephen from the Turks.

Notes. – “Great Duke Ferdinand”: Ferdinand I. was Grand Duke of Florence, an honour first conferred on Cosimo (dei Medici) I. by Pope Pius V., who conferred the patent and crown upon him in Rome. Ferdinand was a cardinal from the age of fourteen, but he had never taken holy orders. He was an amiable and capable ruler, and Tuscany flourished under his government. He was thirty-eight years old when, in 1587, he succeeded his brother on the throne. Riccardi: a noble family of Florence. “The Palazzo Riccardi, a proud and stately residence, was begun in 1430 by Cosimo dei Medici. It remained in the possession of the family till 1659, when they sold it to Gabriele Riccardi; but towards the end of the last century it was bought by the Grand Duke, and is now employed as a species of Somerset House, partly for literary purposes and partly for government offices. It is a noble building, and is most imposing in appearance. The window-sills are by Michael Angelo” (see Murray’s Handbook to North Italy). Via Larga: this was overshadowed by the Medici Palace, symbolical of the shadow cast by the crime of its owners in destroying the liberties of the city. Encolure (Fr.): the neck and shoulders of a horse. Emprise: undertaking, enterprise. “Cosimo and his cursed son”: Cosimo dei Medici was called “the father of his country,” his grandson was “Lorenzo the Magnificent.” Arno: the river which flows through Florence. Petraja: a suburban residence near Florence. Apennine: the mountain range in the valley of which Florence is seated. “Robbia’s craft,” “Robbia’s cornice”: Della Robbia is the name of a family of great distinction in the art history of Florence. “Robbia’s craft” would seem to be a term applied to the kind of work done, and does not refer to the artist himself, as the last famous Della Robbia (Girolamo) died in 1566. The work called Robbia ware was terra-cotta relief covered with enamel. John of Douay (1524-1608), usually called Giovanni da Bologna: a celebrated sculptor of Italy. “stamp of the very Guelph”: English money of our time, our royal family being Guelfs. “de te fabula”: the fable is told concerning yourself.

Strafford. [The Statesman and the Historical Period of the Poem.] It is so important that the reader of the tragedy of Strafford should start with a clear idea of the historical facts with which it deals, that I have included in my article the following extract from Professor Gardiner’s Life of Strafford in the Encyclopædia Britannica. For the benefit of such of my readers as may have forgotten the fact, I may state that, before the earldom was conferred on Strafford, he was Sir Thomas Wentworth: – “High-handed as Wentworth was by nature, his rule in Ireland made him more high-handed than ever. As yet he had never been consulted on English affairs, and it was only in February 1637 that Charles asked his opinion on a proposed interference in the affairs of the Continent. In reply, he assured Charles that it would be unwise to undertake even naval operations till he had secured absolute power at home. The opinion of the judges had given the King the right to levy ship-money; but, unless his Majesty had ‘the like power declared to raise a land army, the crown’ seemed ‘to stand upon one leg at home, to be considerable but by halves to foreign princes abroad.’ The power so gained, indeed, must be shown to be beneficent by the maintenance of good government; but it ought to exist. A beneficent despotism supported by popular gratitude was now Wentworth’s ideal. In his own case Wentworth had cause to discover that Charles’ absolutism was marred by human imperfections. Charles gave ear to courtiers far too often, and frequently wanted to do them a good turn by promoting incompetent persons to Irish offices. To a request from Wentworth to strengthen the position of the deputy by raising him to an earldom he turned a deaf ear. Yet, to make Charles more absolute continued to be the dominant note of his policy; and, when the Scottish Puritans rebelled, he advocated the most decided measures of repression, and in February 1639 he offered the king £2000 as his contribution to the expenses of the coming war. He was, however, too clear-sighted to do otherwise than deprecate an invasion of Scotland before the English army was trained. In September 1639, after Charles’ failure in the first Bishops’ War, Wentworth arrived in England, to conduct in the Star Chamber a case in which the Irish chancellor was being prosecuted for resisting the deputy. From that moment he stepped into the place of Charles’ principal adviser. Ignorant of the extent to which opposition had developed in England during his absence, he recommended the calling of a parliament to support a renewal of the war, hoping that by the offer of a loan from the privy councillors, to which he himself contributed £20,000, he would place Charles above the necessity of submitting to the new parliament if it should prove restive. In January 1640 he was created Earl of Strafford, and in March he went to Ireland to hold a parliament, where the Catholic vote secured a grant of subsidies to be used against the Presbyterian Scots. An Irish army was to be levied to assist in the coming war. When, in April, Strafford returned to England, he found the Commons holding back from a grant of supply, and tried to enlist the peers on the side of resistance. On the other hand, he attempted to induce Charles to be content with a smaller grant than he had originally asked for. The Commons, however, insisted on peace with the Scots; and on May 9th, at the Privy Council, Strafford, though reluctantly, voted for a dissolution. After this Strafford supported the harshest measures. He urged the King to invade Scotland; and, in meeting the objection that England might resist, he uttered the words which cost him dear: ‘You have an army in Ireland’ – the army which, in the regular course of affairs, was to have been employed to operate in the west of Scotland – ‘you may employ here to reduce this kingdom.’ He tried to force the citizens of London to lend money. He supported a project for debasing the coinage, and for seizing bullion in the Tower, the property of foreign merchants. He also advocated the purchasing a loan from Spain by the offer of a future alliance. He was ultimately appointed to command the English army, but he was seized with illness, and the rout of Newburn made the position hopeless. In the great council at York he showed his hope that, if Charles maintained the defensive, the country would still rally round him; whilst he proposed, in order to secure Ireland, that the Scots of Ulster should be ruthlessly driven from their homes. When the Long Parliament met, it was preparing to impeach Strafford, when tidings reached its leaders that Strafford, now Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, had come to London, and had advised the King to take the initiative by accusing his chief opponents of treason. On this the impeachment was hurried on, and the Lords committed Strafford to the Tower. At his trial in Westminster Hall he stood on the ground that each charge against him, even if true, did not amount to treason; whilst Pym urged that, taken as a whole, they showed an intention to change the government, which in itself was treason. Undoubtedly the project of bringing over the Irish army – probably never seriously entertained – did the prisoner most damage; and, when the Lords showed reluctance to condemn him, the Commons dropped the impeachment, and brought in a bill of attainder. The Lords would probably have refused to pass it if they could have relied on Charles’s assurance to relegate Strafford to private life if the bill were rejected. Charles unwisely took part in projects for effecting Strafford’s escape, and even for raising a military force to accomplish that end. The Lords took alarm and passed the bill. On May 9th, 1641, the King, frightened by popular tumults, reluctantly signed a commission for the purpose of giving to it the royal assent, and on the 12th Strafford was executed on Tower Hill.”

[The Tragedy.] (Published 1837, and dedicated to William C. Macready.) Strafford, a tragedy in five acts (written for the stage at Macready’s request), has for its plot the impeachment of the Earl of Strafford and his condemnation and execution. It tells the story of the faithful statesman who loved his sovereign, and sacrificed his life from an almost insane devotion to an utterly unworthy man. The tragedy deals with a period of English history which was richer than any other in the assertion of the rights of the people against the tyranny of their rulers. We are introduced to the band of patriots who secured for us the rights which are to-day the most precious heritage of every Englishman – the brave men who, like Hampden and Pym, resisted the system of forced loans, and the obnoxious tax called “ship-money.” Strafford has been carrying fire and sword through Ireland, and Charles is proposing to persecute the Scotch with similar severity. Wentworth has answered the summons of the king, and has yielded to his request to undertake the Scotch war. He now begins to see how treacherous his sovereign is. Charles, by bribes and promises, has detached him from the people’s cause only to use him as a catspaw, to bear the hatred and fury of the people in his stead. Pym tries to win back “the apostate” to the cause of liberty. They loved each other as David and Jonathan; and the efforts of Pym to touch the heart of his friend, and win him from his chivalrous devotion to Charles to his duty to his country, are finely described in the play. But neither duty, danger, nor the imminent approach of death itself, can divert for a single moment the nobleman who is devoted body and soul to the wretchedest semblance of a “king by right divine” who ever secured such devoted service. Strafford, deaf alike to the calls of friendship and patriotism, serves one man only – Charles, – and leaves the patriots to fight for England as best they may. Lady Carlisle interposes her influence, warns Strafford of his danger, and begs him to secure his retreat while he may; but he is as little moved by the appeals of a woman’s love as by those more powerful and legitimate motives which he has refused to entertain. Such blind devotion to an ideal founded on so insecure a base could have only ruin for its end. Strafford leads the army to the north, is ignominiously defeated, finds that Charles has treacherously listened to proposals of reconciliation with the Scotch, and that the patriots are in league with them; returns to London, and determines to impeach the patriots, but finds his move anticipated. He is himself impeached, a bill of attainder against him is passed, and he is arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. Charles, who had promised that Strafford should not suffer in life, liberty, or estate for his devotion to his cause, makes no effort to save him, though nothing could have been easier than to have done so; and actually, after a little show of hesitation, signs his death warrant at the request of Pym. Passionately and entirely devoted to Strafford, Lady Carlisle has conceived a plan by which, with the King’s connivance, he may escape from the Tower. A boat has been brought to the river entrance of the fortress, and arrangements made for his escape to France; but Strafford refuses to run away from the country which demands his life, and will not let it be said to his children in after years that their father broke prison to save his head; and so, while he delays the acceptance of Lady Carlisle’s assistance, he is led to execution. He sees that not he alone, but the master who has betrayed him, must incur the vengeance of the outraged people of England; and his last words addressed to Pym are to implore him (on his knees) to spare the King’s life. He feels that nothing will move the stern patriot from his sense of duty, and thanks God that it is himself who dies first. He expresses no word of ill-feeling against Pym, and goes bravely to death, the victim of a misplaced affection almost without parallel in our history. Strafford is a presentation of “naked souls,” as Dr. J. Todhunter called it. “They are almost like Hugo’s personages, monomaniacs of ideas – Strafford of loyalty to Charles; Lady Carlisle of loyalty to Strafford’s infatuation; Pym of loyalty to an ideal England… Browning has not left the King even a rag of conventional royalty to cover his nakedness. He has stript him with a vengeance.” How far Browning’s representation of the circumstances attendant on the impeachment and condemnation of Strafford is true to the actual facts must be left to the decision of the greatest authority on the history of the period – Professor Gardiner. In his introduction to Miss E. H. Hickey’s Strafford, he says: “We may be sure that it was not by accident that Mr. Browning, in writing this play, decisively abandoned all attempt to be historically accurate. Only here and there does anything in the course of the drama take place as it could have taken place at the actual court of Charles I. Not merely are there frequent minor inaccuracies, but the very roots of the situation are untrue to fact. The real Strafford was far from opposing the war with the Scots at the time when the Short Parliament was summoned. Pym never had such a friendship for Strafford as he is represented as having; and, to any one who knows anything of the habits of Charles, the idea of Pym or his friends entering into colloquies with Strafford, and even bursting unannounced into Charles’s presence, is, from the historical point of view, simply ridiculous. So completely does the drama proceed irrespectively of historical truth, that the critic may dispense with the thankless task of pointing out discrepancies. He will be better employed in asking what ends those discrepancies were intended to serve, and whether the neglect of truth of fact has resulted in the highest truth of character. – For myself I can only say that, every time I read the play, I feel more certain that Mr. Browning has seized the real Strafford, the man of critical brain, of rapid decision, and tender heart, who strove for the good of his nation without sympathy for the generation in which he lived. Charles I., too, with his faults perhaps exaggerated, is the real Charles. Of Lady Carlisle we know too little to speak with anything like certainty; but, in spite of Mr. Browning’s statement that his character of her is purely imaginary, there is a wonderful parallelism between the Lady Carlisle which history conjectures rather than describes. There is the same tendency to fix the heart upon the truly great man, and to labour for him without the requital of human affection; though in the play no part is played by that vanity which seems to have been the main motive with the real personage.” It has frequently been said that Browning, in this play, has closely followed the story as given in the Life of Strafford by the late John Forster. The reason for this undoubted fact has recently been given to the world. In the Pall Mall Gazette, in the month of April 1890, Dr. F. J. Furnivall published the following letter, which asserts the late poet’s right to almost the whole of the Life of Strafford that has hitherto gone under the name of the late John Forster, in the second volume of the Lives of Eminent British Statesmen in Lardner’s “Cabinet Cyclopædia,” pp. 178-411, with the Strafford Appendix, pp. 412-21: “This volume was published in 1836. John Forster wrote the life of Eliot, the first in the volume, and began that of Strafford. He then fell ill; and as he was anxious to produce the book in the time agreed on, Browning offered to finish Strafford for him, on his handing over all the material he had accumulated for it. Forster was greatly relieved by Browning’s kindness. The poet set to work, completed Strafford’s life on his own lines, in accordance with his own conception of Strafford’s character, but generously said nothing about it till after Forster’s death. Then he told a few of his friends – me among them – of how he had helped Forster. On my telling Prof. Gardiner of this, I found that he knew it; and had been long convinced that the conception of Strafford in this Lardner Life was not John Forster’s, but was Robert Browning’s. The other day Prof. Gardiner urged me to make the fact of Browning’s authorship public; and I do so now, though I have frequently mentioned it to friends in private; and at the Browning Society, when a member has said, ‘It is curious how closely Browning has followed his authority, Forster’s Life of Strafford,’ I have answered, ‘Yes, because he wrote it himself.’ We thus understand why, when Macready asked Browning, on May 26th, 1836, to write him a play, the poet suggested Strafford as its subject; and why, the Life being finished in 1836, the play was printed and played in 1837. The internal evidence will satisfy any intelligent reader that almost all the prose Life is the poet’s. It is not only little touches like these on pp. 182-3, describing James I., which reveal Browning, – ‘He was not an absolute fool, and little more can be said of him … whenever an obvious or judicious truth seemed likely to fall in his way, his pen infallibly waddled off from it’; on p. 227, ‘divers ill-spelt and solemn sillinesses from the King,’ the reference to the ‘Sordello’ Ezzelin¹⁹ on p. 229, etc., – but it is the conception and working-out of the character of Strafford, ‘that he was consistent to himself throughout,’ p. 228, etc., and that his one object was to make Charles ‘the most absolute lord in Christendom,’ and that this explains all apparent inconsistencies and vanities in his conduct. Let any one read the following last paragraph of the Life, and ask himself if it is not the poet’s hand. Page 411: ‘A great lesson is written in the life of this truly extraordinary person. In the career of Strafford is to be sought the justification of the world’s “appeal from tyranny to God.” In him Despotism had at length obtained an instrument with mind to comprehend, and resolution to act upon, her principles in their length and breadth; and enough of her purposes were effected by him to enable mankind to see “as from a tower the end of all.” I cannot discern one false step in Strafford’s public conduct, one glimpse of a recognition of an alien principle, one instance of a dereliction of the law of his being, which can come in to dispute the decisive result of the experiment, or explain away its failure. The least vivid fancy will have no difficulty in taking up the interrupted design, and by wholly enfeebling, or materially emboldening, the insignificant nature of Charles, and by according some half-dozen years of immunity to the “fretted tenement” of Strafford’s “fiery soul,” – contemplate then, for itself, the perfect realisation of the scheme of “making the prince the most absolute lord in Christendom.” That done, – let it pursue the same course with respect to Eliot’s noble imaginings, or to young Vane’s dreamy aspirings, and apply in like manner a fit machinery to the working out the project which made the dungeon of the one a holy place, and sustained the other in his self-imposed exile. The result is great and decisive! It establishes, in renewed force, those principles of political conduct which have endured, and must continue to endure, “like truth from age to age.”’ Take again a couple of passages of two and a half lines each on Strafford’s illnesses, on page 369, and recollect that Browning owed much to Donne: – ‘The soul of the Earl of Strafford was indeed lodged, to use the expression of his favourite Donne, within a “low and fatal room” … But even by the side of the body’s weakness we find a witness of the spirit’s triumph, – a vindication of the mightiness of will!’ And on page 370 – ‘Then, when every energy was to be taxed to the uttermost, the question of his fiery spirit’s supremacy was indeed put to the issue, by a complication of ghastly diseases.’ Are these and like passages by John Forster? No! They are Robert Browning’s Plenty of others have his mark, especially those passages analysing and philosophising on character. I have appealed to Messrs. Smith & Elder to reprint this Life of Strafford, with an Introduction by Prof. Gardiner; but I suppose that there is no copyright in it, as it has always gone under John Forster’s name. Assuredly all students of Browning should have this Life on their shelves. I should say that Forster did not write more than the first four pages of it, and that Browning began with ‘James I. … came to this country in an ecstasy of infinite relief,’ on page 182.” In this Life of Strafford there is a striking passage on the question of that statesman’s “apostacy.” “In one word, what it is desired to impress upon the reader, before the delineation of Wentworth in his after years, is this —that he was consistent to himself throughout. I have always considered that much good wrath is thrown away upon what is usually called ‘apostacy.’ In the majority of cases, if the circumstances are thoroughly examined, it will be found that there has been ‘no such thing.’ The position on which the acute Roman thought fit to base his whole theory of æsthetics —