¹ The best illustration and foundation for all other such comments: “The story of the Franceschini case, as Mr. Browning relates it, forms a circle of evidence to its one central truth; and this circle was constructed in the manner in which the worker in Etruscan gold prepares the ornamental circlet which will be worn as a ring. The pure metal is too soft to bear hammer or file; it must be mixed with alloy to gain the necessary power of resistance. The ring once formed and embossed, the alloy is disengaged, and a pure gold ornament remains. Mr. Browning's material was also inadequate to his purpose, though from a different cause. It was too hard. It was ‘pure crude fact,‘secreted from the fluid being of the men and women whose experience it had formed. In its existing state it would have broken up under the artistic attempt to weld and round it. He supplied an alloy, the alloy of fancy, or—-as he also calls it—of one fact more: This fact being the echo of those past existences awakened within his own. He breathed into the dead record the breath of his own life; and when his ring of evidence had re-formed, first in elastic then in solid strength, here delicately incised, there broadly stamped with human thought and passion, he could cast fancy aside, and bid his readers recognize in what he set before them unadulterated human truth.”—Mrs. Sutherland Orr, Handbook to Browning's Works (1930), pp. 76–77.

² The best illustration, though consistently overlooked by later critics who claim credit for discovering a discrepancy in the metaphor: “Bottini is no more astray… than the poet himself is in his comparison between ring-making and poetry. … The gold is the dead matter of the poem; the alloy is the ‘surplusage of soul,‘ which the poet projects into the dead matter to make it malleable; the embossing and shaping is the poetic form; the spirt of acid by which the alloy is washed away is some final act of the poet, by which he removes all traces of himself, and leaves the poem quite impersonal. This Mr. Browning claims to have done … But the reader, who will see that each speaker in these idyls talks unmis-takeable Browningese, … will justifiably wonder what spirt it is which has caused that which was only just now alloy suddenly to have become pure unalloyed gold. … For in truth, we cannot find that Mr. Browning makes any special spirt to clear away his own additions to the story, except an argument to prove that the alloy is no alloy, but spirit and life. According to him, historical facts are gold, but gold in the ingot. The gold is unformed; the fact unvivified, life-less, and unremembered. An old and dead fact can only be recreated by being infused, transfused, inspired, by the living force of a creative, or rather re-creative, fancy, which is related to fact as alloy is related to gold in making the ring— necessary to prepare it for the hammer and file which are to give it artistic shape and imagery. … However true all this may be, it does not seem to account for any double action of the poet. The alloy is added by one act. … But whatever alloy the poet first contributes remains in the perfect poem, unless he writes it all over again. There are not two distinct acts—first of infusing surplusage of soul, and next of washing it away. Here, as elsewhere, Mr. Browning seems, of set purpose, to let an element of incompleteness, or even error, remain in his similes.”—Anonymous, “Mr. Browning's Latest Poetry”, North American Review, li (1869), 104–106.

³ The most vitriolic illustration and generally unaccepted: In writing about the “poet's word for the relation of his epical production to its inspiring source”, Mrs. Russell says: “And that word he made emphatic and unequivocal. … His reconstructing fancy was declared … no irresponsible guesswork, but a thorough and honest quest in search of the hidden truth; an entirely successful quest, we are assured, a triumphant pursuit and capture of those shrouded verities that had hitherto defied investigation. That is to say, the ‘ring’ presented the facts of the ‘book’ without wrenching or falsification, but with the just explanation that rewards patient study and clear insight. It is not fiction but authentic history, poetic in form and spirit but as truthful as any encyclopedia. … All of which leads up to and requires this present, if not final ironic situation—that in the interests of that very truth to which Browning offers such eloquent lip-service, we are obliged to declare that… he did in paying his homage to reality say it with words rather than deeds. … That Browning's headstrong emotionalism should have betrayed him into flagrant injustice is not strange, but it is curious indeed that the whole flock of critics should have trotted along so docilely after him. They … permit him … to weave a conscienceless web of falsity. … ”In the first place, Browning muddles his own metaphor until it becomes a treacherous quagmire, … [and] in this gratuitous performance he so thoroughly misinterprets himself and misleads his readers that practically the reverse of his assertions constitutes the actual case.“—Frances Theresa Russell One Word More on Browning (1927), pp. 110–111, 113, 122,114; ”Gold and Alloy,“ Studies in Philology, xxi (July, 1924), 467.

⁴ A. K. Cook, Commentary upon The Ring and the Book (1920), p. 2.

⁵ Mrs. Browning reveals that Browning visited a Roman artist-jeweler: The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed Kenyon (1897), ii, 354–355; Browning writes in the ninth fine of the poem: “(Craftsmen instruct me).”

⁶ “Gold-copper alloys tarnish -on exposure to air owing to oxidation of the copper, and blacken on heating in air from the same cause, This oxidized coating may be removed and the colour of fine gold (not that of the original alloy) produced by plunging [spraying would do the same] the metal into dilute acids or alkaline solution, the operation being technically known as ‘blanching.‘ The colour of some alloys may be improved without previous oxidation by dissolving out some copper by acids, a film of pure gold being thus left on the outside which can be burnished. French jewelers use a hot solution of two parts of nitrate of potash, one part of alum, and one part of common salt for this purpose.”—T. K. Rose, The Metallurgy of Gold (1915), p. 35.

⁷ The Ring and the Book, ed. Dowden (Oxford Edition, 1912), p. ix.