printed in Men and Women, and a few from Dramatic Lyrics as first
printed, include some of Browning's finest and most characteristic
work. In several of them the poet displays his familiarity with the
life and spirit of the Renaissance--a period portrayed by him with a
fidelity more real than history--for he enters into the feelings that
give rise to action, while the historian is busied only with the
results growing out of the moving force of feeling.

The egotism of the Ferrara husband outraged at the gentle wife because
she is as gracious toward those who rendered her small courtesies, and
seemed as thankful to them as she was to him for his gift of a
nine-hundred-years-old name, opens up for inspection the heart of a
husband at a time when men exercised complete control over their
wives, and could satisfy their jealous, selfish instincts by any cruel
methods they chose to adopt, with no one to say them "nay." The
highly developed artistic sense shown by this husband is not
incompatible with his consummate selfishness and cruelty, as many
tales of that time might be brought forward to illustrate. The
husband in "The Statue and the Bust" belongs to the same type, and the
situation there is the inevitable outcome of a civilization in which
women were not consulted as to whom they would marry, and naturally
often fell a prey to love if it should come to them afterwards.
Weakness of will in the case of the lovers in this poem wrecked their
lives; for they were not strong enough to follow either duty or love.
Another glimpse is caught of this period when husbands and brothers
and fathers meted out what they considered justice to the women in "In
a Gondola." "The Grammarian's Funeral" gives also an aspect of
Renaissance life--the fervor for learning characteristic of the
earlier days of the Renaissance when devoted pedants, as Arthur Symons
says in referring to this poem, broke ground in the restoration to the