there
is so much told, as in these lines, 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 have said
of the central Renaissance, in thirty pages of 'The Stones of Venice,'
put into as many lines, Browning's also being the antecedent work."
(_Modern Painters_, Vol. iv, pp. 337-9.) "It was inevitable that the
great period of the Renaissance should produce men of the type of the
Bishop of St. Praxed; it would be grossly unfair to set him down as the
type of the churchmen of his time." Berdoe, _Browning Cyclopaedia_, p.
81.

1. _Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity._ Cf. ll. 8-9, 51-52, as
illustrative of the religious professionalism of the Bishop's talk. He
drops into the ecclesiastical conception of life and death, and into the
phraseology of his order.

21. _Epistle-side._ The right-hand side facing the altar, where the
epistle is read by the priest acting as celebrant, the gospel being read
from the other side by the priest acting as assistant.

29. _Peach-blossom marble._ This rosy marble delights the Bishop as much
as the pale cheap onion-stone offends him. The lapis-lazuli, a rich blue
stone (l. 42), the antique-black (Nero-antico), a rare black marble (l.
34), the beautiful green jasper (l. 68), the elaborate carving planned
for the bronze frieze (l. 56-62, 106-111), show not only that the Bishop
covets what is costly, but that his highly cultivated taste knows real
beauty.

34. _That conflagration._ The eagerness of the Bishop for the lump of
the lapis-lazuli has made him steal even from his own church.

41. _Olive-frail._ A basket made of rushes, used for packing olives.

57. _Those Pans and Nymphs._ The underlying paganism of the Bishop
produces a strangely incongruous mixture on his tomb--the Savior, St.
Praxed, Moses, Pan, and the Nymphs.

58. _Thyrsus._ The ivy-coiled staff or spear stuck in a pine-cone,
symbol of the Bacchic orgy.

68. _Travertine._ A white limestone, the name being a corruption of
Tiburninus, from Tibur, now Tivoli, near Rome, whence this stone comes.

77. _Choice Latin._ The Bishop's scholarship was as good as his taste in
marbles. The _Elucescebat_ ("he was illustrious") of l. 99 Browning
called "dog-latin" and he called "Ulpian, the golden jurist, a copper
latinist." (See letter to D. G. Rossetti. Quoted by A. J. George,
_Select Poems of Browning_, p. 366.) Tully'