Reviews

R430204A.  The Return of the Druses.

The Spectator, 4 February 1843, p. 116.

As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 392.

The scene of this “tragedy” (God wot!) is laid in an island of the Grecian seas, where some Druses have been reduced to bondage by the Knights of Rhodes, and oppressed by their Prefect. The story is not told very intelligibly; but, as near as we can make it out, a Druse professes himself their Khaliff Hakeem, who had been dead some hundred years; gets up a conspiracy against the Knights; and, by expressing himself in a style obscurely mystical, he unintentionally excites his mistress, Anael, to kill the Prefect; when, after a series of dull and puzzling situations, Anael dies, the impostor Khaliff stabs himself, and the Druses are left on the start for Asia Minor. After this, we need not say that the story is improbable, and without interest: but it may be added, that the actors are mere phantasmagoria, talking Browning; and that the composition, with the usual faults, displays little of the power of the writer.

Reviewed:

Bells & Pomegranates. No. IV. The Return of the Druses (RB), London: Edward Moxon, 1843.

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