e, but that, when he had arranged his affairs
in that city, he would return without fail to his Majesty; he added,
that when he came back, his wife should accompany him, to the end that
he might remain in France the more quietly; and that he would bring
with him pictures and sculptures of great value. The King,
confiding in these promises, gave him money for the purchase of
those pictures and sculptures, Andrea taking an oath on the gospels
to return within the space of a few months, and that done
he departed to his native city.

"He arrived safely in Florence, enjoying the society
of his beautiful wife, and that of his friends, with the sight
of his native city, during several months; but when the period
specified by the King, and that at which he ought to have returned,
had come and passed, he found himself at the end, not only of
his own money, but, what with building" (the "melancholy little house
they built to be so gay with") "indulging himself with
various pleasures, and doing no work, of that belonging to
the French monarch also, the whole of which he had consumed.
He was, nevertheless, determined to return to France, but the prayers
and tears of his wife had more power than his own necessities,
or the faith which he had pledged to the King."

"And so for a pretty woman's sake, was a great nature degraded.
And out of sympathy with its impulses, broad, and deep,
and tender as only the greatest can show, `Andrea del Sarto',
our great, sad poem, was written."

The monologue exhibits great perfection of finish. Its composition
was occasioned, as Mr. Furnivall learned from the poet himself
(see `Browning Society's Papers', Part II., p. 161),
by the portrait of Andrea del Sarto and his wife, painted by himself,
and now in the Pitti Palace, in Florence. Mr. Browning's friend,
and his wife's friend, Mr. John Kenyon (the same to whom Mrs. Browning
dedicated `Aurora Leigh'), had asked the poet to buy him a copy
of Andrea del Sarto's picture. None could be got, and so Mr. Browning
put into a poem what the picture had said to himself, and sent it
to Mr. Kenyon. It was certainly a worthy substitute.

Fra Lippo Lippi.

The Italian artist, Lippi, is the speaker. Lippi was one
of the representatives of the protest made in the fifteenth century
against the conventional spiritualization in the art of his time.
In the monologue he gives expression to his faith in the real,
in the absolute spiritual signif