His argument is very strong, and would be unanswerable, but for the touch of speciousness which Baldinucci by anticipation detects in it: Mr. Browning-as did Furini-regards the breach of formal chastity exclusively from the artist's point of view.
"A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.)"
Mrs. Sutherland Orr
Artfully hiding his own agency, the master-spring of the gigantic machinery of fraud, which, too mighty for a single hand, required an assistant,-throwing into obscurity the sin, while, knowing the undaunted courage and desperate fortunes of the man, he did not affect to conceal the danger; expatiating upon the advantages, the immense and almost inexhaustible resources of wealth which his scheme suddenly opened upon one in the deepest abyss of poverty, and slightly sketching, as if to excite vanity, the ingenuity and genius by which the scheme originated, and could only be sustained,-Crauford's detail of temptation, in its knowledge of human nature, in its adaptation of act to principles, in its web-like craft of self-concealment, and the speciousness of its lure, was indeed a splendid masterpiece of villanous invention.
"The Disowned, Complete"
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
"Just speciousness, that's what I call it.
"Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas"
Lloyd Osbourne