A poem of quite another order of art, a life-like sketch rather than a creation, is found in _Waring_. The original of Waring was one of Browning's friends, Alfred Domett, the author of _Ranolf and Amohia_, then or afterwards Prime Minister in New Zealand.[18] The poem is written in a free and familiar style, which rises from time to time into a kind of precipitate brilliance; it is more personal in detail than Browning often allows himself to be; and its humour is blithe and friendly. In another poem, now known as _Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister_, the humour is grotesque, bitter and pungent, the humour of hate. The snarling monk of the Spanish cloister pours out on poor, innocent, unsuspecting "Brother Lawrence" a wealth of really choice and masterly vituperation, not to be matched out of Shakespeare. The poem is a clever study of that mood of active disgust which most of us have felt toward some possibly inoffensive enough person, whose every word, look or action jars on the nerves. It flashes, too, a brilliant comic light on the natural tendencies of asceticism. Side by side with this poem, under the general name of _Camp and Cloister_, was published the vigorous and touching little ballad now known as _Incident of the French Camp_, a stirring lyric of war, such as Browning has always been able, rarely as he has cared, to write. The ringing _Cavalier Tunes_ (so graphically set to music by Sir C. Villiers Stanford) strike the same note; so, too, does the wonderfully clever little riding poem, _Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr_, a _tour de force_ strung together on a single rhyme: "As I ride, as I ride."
_Count Gismond_, the companion of _My Last Duchess_, is a vivid little tale, told with genuine sympathy with the mediæval spirit. It is almost like an anticipation of some of the remarkable studies of the Middle Ages contained in Morris's first and best book of poems, _The Defence of Guenevere_, published sixteen years later. The mediæval temper of entire confidence in the ordeal by duel has never been better rendered than in these two stanzas, the very kernel of the poem, spoken by the falsely-accused girl:--
" ... Till out strode Gismond; then I knew That I was saved. I never met His face before, but, at first view, I felt quite sure that God had set Himself to Satan; who would spend A minute's mistrust on the end?