--
* `Winter's Tale', V. 2. 106.
--

"I know no other piece of modern English, prose or poetry,
in which there is so much told, as in these lines [`The Bishop orders
his Tomb'], of the Renaissance spirit, -- its worldliness,
inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art,
of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all that I said
of the Central Renaissance in thirty pages of the `Stones of Venice'
put into as many lines, Browning's being also the antecedent work.
The worst of it is that this kind of concentrated writing needs
so much SOLUTION before the reader can fairly get the good of it,
that people's patience fails them, and they give the thing up
as insoluble; though, truly, it ought to be to the current
of common thought like Saladin's talisman, dipped in clear water,
not soluble altogether, but making the element medicinable."


Professor Dowden, in regard to Mr. Browning's doctrines on
the subject of art, remarks: --


"It is always in an unfavorable light that he depicts the virtuoso
or collector, who, conscious of no unsatisfied aspirations
such as those which make the artist's joy and sorrow,
rests in the visible products of art, and looks up to nothing
above or beyond them. . . . The unbelieving and worldly spirit
of the dying Bishop, who orders his tomb at St. Praxed's,