[Footnote 21: The song professedly refers to Catherine Cornaro, the
Venetian Queen of Cyprus, and is the only one in the poem that is based
on any fact at all.]
[Footnote 22: This pamphlet has supplied Mr. Browning with some of his
most curious facts. It fell into his hands in London.]
[Footnote 23: The first hour after sunset.]
[Footnote 24: "Villa" is often called "vineyard" or "vigna," on account
of the vineyard attached to it.]
[Footnote 25: It is difficult to reconcile this explicit denial of
Pompilia's statements with the belief in her implied in her merely
nominal punishment: unless we look on it as part of the formal
condemnation which circumstances seemed to exact.]
[Footnote 26: A letter written in this strain was also produced on the
trial; and Pompilia owned to having written it, but only in the sense of
writing over in ink what her husband had traced in pencil--being totally
ignorant of its contents.]
[Footnote 27: Count Guido thought, or affected to think, that these had
been thrown by Caponsacchi.]
[Footnote 28: The disciple of Michael de Molinos, not to be confounded
with Louis Molina, who is especially known by his attempt to reconcile
the theory of grace with that of free will. Molinos was the founder of
an exaggerated Quietism. He held that the soul could detach itself from
the body so as to become indifferent to its action, and therefore
non-responsible for it; and it was natural that all who defied the
received laws of conduct, or were suspected of doing so, should be
stigmatized as his followers. Molinism was a favourite bugbear among the
orthodox Romanists of Innocent the Twelfth's day.]
[Footnote 29: A passing allusion is made to this Gomez case in one of
the manuscript letters, the writer of which begs Cencini (clearly also
an advocate), to send him the papers concerning it. The place it
occupies in the thoughts of the two lawyers, as Mr. Browning depicts
them, is very characteristic of the manner in which his imagination has
embraced and vivified every detail of the situation.]
[Footnote 30: The poems to which I refer as now included in "Men and
Women" will be found so in the editions of 1868 and 1888-9; though the
redistribution made in 1863 has much curtailed their number.]
[Footnote 31: It was in this poem that Mr. Browning first adopted the
plan of spelling Greek names in the Greek manner. He did so, as he tells
us in the preface to his "Agamemnon," "innocently enough;" because the
change commended itself to his own eye and ear. He has even assured his
friends that if the innovation had been rationally opposed, or simply
not accepted, he would probably himself have abandoned it. But when,
years later, in "Balaustion's Adventure," the new spelling became the
subject of attacks which all but ignored the existence of the work from
any other point of view, the thought of yielding was no longer
admissible. The majority of our best scholars now follow Mr. Browning's
example.]