and goes on to the question of the dowry and the next duchess and his other works of art as if all had one use only-to be his and please him.

Later, and better even, among these early lyrics is "The Bishop's Tomb at St. Praxed's" (v. 257). It was published in Hood's Magazine in 1845, and republished among the "Romances and Lyrics" in that year, and now put with the poet's Renaissance studies.

The scene is the death-bed of a Roman bishop of the sixteenth century. It is the bishop who speaks. He is dying, and has accepted the fact so completely that he sees himself dead and buried, and lying through the years on his tomb in St. Praxed's Church. His one thought now is to arrange for, and, if he can, make all sure and clear about, a tomb such as shall fit his value and his taste, and he has called his sons round his bed to talk to them at large of this matter. He describes the tomb and his whole wish regarding it, so that his life and soul are disclosed. He has had, by his confession, his share of life's pleasures; he means to have his share of death's honours, since life, unhappily, can't go on. Both may be "vanity," but

both are the world's way and good to man.

With his sons about him, he recalls their "mother"

and his gay life many years ago.

Sorry, is he? Not

It is past and gone, of folly. And the

at all. It was good while it lasted. and vain regrets are a bad kind woman is dead, and now it is his turn for that which comes to all. Looking back, he wonders what man's

life is, and what death may be which ends it. He doesn't know and hardly cares, yet often as he lies in the long still night all seems a dream, and he hardly knows whether he is dead or alive. But it will be death soon for him, and so about his tomb. He has been done out of the best place in the church, but he will have the best tomb--one that will move the envy of his rival even in the grave. He has worked out the design for it, and enjoys the triumph of it as much as if it already stood in St. Praxed's. The tomb is to be of jasper, the slab antique black basalt, the columns peach-blossom marble, the frieze bronze, and a ball of lapis-lazuli between the knees of the effigy. And whence came this precious ball? He stole it from a burning church, and hid it for this very use. But will his sons give it him, or steal it from him, as he from the church? He has fears, but he bribes them with all he can offer, and goes on to finish the frieze, with its Pans and Nymphs, and Christ and Moses. And he is exigent as to the epitaph. It must be pure Latin, Cicero's every word; not Gandolph's bad Latin.

Such is his plan. Will the sons carry it out? They get tired of his talk, and, he fears, will take his property and give him a beggar's tomb. He begs them, more than he would for his soul, not to do so, and tries to hope as he dwells on his plan, until he hears the Mass and feels the incense, and tells how often in the night he seems to turn to a piece of sculpture as he lies on his bed. But now he is tired, and wanders, and ends by admitting that his scheme

has no chance of being carried out.

He sends

His first impulse is to punish his sons, but he does not. them away kindly, with some sense, perhaps, of retribution in their selfishness.

That the poem has fine dramatic points and true characterization is thus clear. And there are still points of exegesis it may be well to glance at as bearing on the bishop and his age.

I. The bishop has a few "serious" phrases, but no serious beliefs. His survey of life, his concern with death, both prove it. "The world's a dream," he says, though for him it has been and is still the only reality. Yet there is sincerity in his phrase. It looks and feels so to him now because it is remote, its pleasures gone, only memories left, no inward gains. So when he speaks of his life as “brief and evil,” he reminds us of what Martial said that "though many of us have too much, none of us ever have enough." Life had been "good," but it had gone too fast. There is wrong in the fact that it should go at all, and death is the last wrong to those for whom the flight of the years is never a process of gain, but always of loss.

2. And how little difference death makes to him! It is not great and solemn to the bishop. He is the same man. The rivalries, the care for artistic show, and all the vanity and worldliness of the man you find beyond death and on the tomb. And that is the fact of life. To the frivolous death is trivial. For what does the bishop think of? Of "what is beyond." And what is beyond death for him? The grave, and

nothing more; and so the grand question is about a satisfactory tomb.

3. And how curious the passion of which the bishop is so full-that passion for monuments, and all our care for what may happen to our names after we have passed away! Is it rational, or is it the vainest of man's illusions? our self-respect carried beyond death, or only a wish to keep a kind of place and value in the world when we have no place more in it? Two things seem clear about it in the bishop's case- that it is a sensuous rather than a spiritual wish, and that the bishop does not think of himself as dead. He is in the church still, not in the grave, but on the tomb. That effigy becomes the man; he feels through it and lives in it.

4. And what of the bishop's religion? He has had a Church and a ritual, and he has cared for them, but hardly a creed, and not a faith. "The blessed mutter of the Mass," "the perfume of the incense," "the aery dome of the church "—these are the notes of it. It is the religion of a sceptical and sensuous age. The "angels live" in the dome. There is no heaven for him. His thoughts get no higher than the material suggestions of ritual and art.

5. And his care for art is the bishop's strong point, as it was the strong point of his age. He is the epitome of the Renaissance in this and in his style of art. His frieze, with its mixture of mythologies, and his good Latin and bad morals, express this. And Browning has a liking for that age and its men,

and a secure mastery of its types and secrets. This mastery springs in part from sympathy. He likes the sensuous energy and frankness, the vigour and enjoyment and audacity, the care for art, the learning, and all the picturesqueness and force of the men and their lives, while aware, too, of their terrible faults.

6. And so, as forcibly as Ruskin, he suggests the ways in which the temper and character of the Renaissance told on its art. This bishop, worldly, selfish, and sensual, would invent such art, and carry into the Church all the vanity of his heart and his life. His art, indeed, is as great an offence to his faith as his life itself.

But, leaving the bishop, let us recur to the question of art we began with. Such poems make clear the principle of the work the poet first made in these dramatic lyrics. Drama would have put the bishop before you through action and speech. Here he is put by speech only. That is the sole action of the piece, and yet it leaves on you a clear sense of the man and the scene. How is so distinctly dramatic a result gained without the usual dramatic means? By the energy of speech, which is thought-intense and immediate self-expression. The character is in action, and the poet's medium gives that action vividly and directly.

M