other compulsion, and to restore his capacity for exercising enlightened free will and moral judgment", whether for good or evil. Ambiguities Pippa's song influences Luigi to leave that night for Vienna, preserving him from the police. But does he give up his plan to assassinate the Austrian Emperor Franz? In 1848, a reviewer for Sharpe's London Magazine chided Browning for failing to clarify: However, Luigi's line "'Tis God's voice calls: how could I stay?" suggests that "what has come to him is the conviction of the necessity of the assassination." Browning sympathized with the republican cause in Italy, believing that "once the Italians regained liberty and independence, all of the dormant positive qualities that had made them the foremost Eueropean nation during the Renaissance would reawaken", a view he expressed in the poem 'Old Pictures in Florence' (1855), in which the narrator Pippa Passes is a closet drama and many of its actions are told through the characters' speech rather than through stage directions. A consequence of this is that readers have disagreed about the actions of Sebald and Ottima after they hear Pippa's song. Many followed Alexandra Orr, who wrote, "Something in [Pippa's] song strikes [Sebald's] conscience like a thunderbolt, and its reviving force awakens Ottima's also: both are spiritually saved", but J. M. Purcell disagreed, arguing "that Pippa's song has recalled Sebald—but not Ottima, however—to his moral senses; and in his revulsion for his sins of ingratitude, adultery and murder, he kills Ottima and himself." Who will read Browning? Charmed by the character of Pippa, Alfred Noyes pronounced Pippa Passes to be Browning's "most perfect achievement", but even the sentimental passages of the work had not been able to win over all Victorian critics. Walter Besant criticised the work in his 1875 novel With Harp and Crown, singling out "The hill-side's dew-pearled!" ("Was there ever such a stuttering collocation of syllables to confound the reader and utterly destroy a sweet little lyric?") and denying Browning's future appeal: "A distressing blunder" The play contains an error rooted in Robert Browning's unfamiliarity with vulgar slang. In her closing song, Pippa says: "Twat" was and remains vulgar slang for a woman's external genitalia. But in 1886, Frederick James Furnivall, a contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary, asked the poet for his source, and Browning replied "that he got the word from the Royalist rhymes entitled 'Vanity of Vanities,' on Sir Harry