--Ay, like departing altar-ministrants,
And leave me in my church, the church for peace,
That I may watch at leisure if he leers--
Old Gandolf, at me, from his onion-stone,
As still he envied me, so fair she was!

NOTES

"The Bishop orders his Tomb" This half-delirious pleading of the
dying prelate for a tomb which shall gratify his luxurious artistic
tastes and personal rivalries, presents dramatically not merely the
special scene of the worldly old bishop's petulant struggle against
his failing power, and his collapse, finally, beneath the will of
his so-called nephews, it also illustrates a characteristic gross
form of the Renaissance spirit encumbered with Pagan survivals,
fleshly appetites, and selfish monopolizings which hampered its
development.-- "It is nearly all that I said of the Central
Renaissance--its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy,
ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin--in
thirty pages of the 'Stones of Venice,' put into as many lines,
Browning's being also the antecedent work" (Ruskin). The Church of
St.Praxed is notable for the beauty of its stone-work and mosaics,
one of its chapels being so extraordinarily rich that it was called
, or the Garden of Paradise; and so, although the
bishop and his tomb there are imaginary, it supplies an appropriate
setting for the poetic scene.

1. Vanity, saith the preacher: Ecclesiastes 1.2.

21. Epistle-side: the right-hand side facing the altar, where the