one side.

31. _I'd like his face._ The painter cannot look upon the crowd of men
about him without seeing faces he would like to draw. One man would do
as a model for Judas. Another would do well in a picture Fra Lippo's
imagination quickly conjures up of a slave holding the head of John the
Baptist by the hair. In Fra Lippo's real picture of the beheading of
John the Baptist the head is brought in by Salome, the daughter of
Herodias, on a great platter.

46. _Carnival._ The days preceding Lent. A period marked by much gaiety,
street revelry, masking, etc.

53. _Flower o' the broom._ These flower songs, called _stornelli_, are
improvised by the peasants at their work. "The _stornelli_ consists of
three lines. The first line usually contains the name of a flower which
sets the rhyme and is five syllables long. Then the love theme is told
in two lines of eleven syllables each, agreeing by rhyme, assonance, or
repetition with the first." (Porter and Clarke note in Camberwell
Edition.) Browning does not follow the model strictly.

73. _Jerome._ St. Jerome was one of the Fathers of the Christian Church.
During a part of his early life he was given up to worldly pleasures,
and for this he did penance by living for a number of years in a cave in
a desert region. The penitent St. Jerome was a popular devotional
subject in early Christian art. "The scene is generally a wild rocky
solitude; St. Jerome, half-naked, emaciated, with matted hair and beard,
is seen on his knees before a crucifix, beating his breast with a
stone." (Mrs. Jameson, _Sacred and Legendary Art_, i, 308.)

80. _What am I a beast for?_ If you had happened, says Fra Lippo, to
catch Cosimo in a frolic like this, of course you would have said
nothing; but you think a monk is a beast if he indulges in these
nocturnal pleasures. Yet why should the fact that I break monastic rules
make you consider me a beast? Just let me tell you how I happened to
become a monk.

83. _I starved there._ Note the vivid picture of the life of a street
gamin here and in lines 112-126.

88. _Aunt Lapaccia._ Vasari says, "The child was for some time under the
care of a certain Mona Lapaccia, his aunt, who brought him up with very
great difficulty till he had attained his eighth year, when, being no
longer able to support the burden of his maintenance, she placed him in
the above-named convent of the Carmelites." "Trussed," means "firmly
seized."

117. _Which gentlemen_, etc. G