s:--

"Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes
of the Middle Ages; always vital, right, and profound;
so that in the matter of art, . . .there is hardly a principle
connected with the mediaeval temper, that he has not struck upon
in those seemingly careless and too rugged rhymes of his.
There is a curious instance, by the way, in a short poem *1*
referring to this very subject of tomb and image sculpture;
all illustrating just one of those phases of local human character
which, though belonging to Shakespeare's own age, he {Shakespeare}
never noticed, because it was specially Italian and un-English;
connected also closely with the influence of mountains on the heart,
and therefore with our immediate inquiries.*2* I mean the kind
of admiration with which a southern artist regarded the STONE he worked in;
and the pride which populace or priest took in the possession of precious
mountain substance, worked into the pavements of their cathedrals,
and the shafts of their tombs.

--
*1* `The Bishop orders his Tomb in St. Praxed's Church'.

*2* `The Mountain Glory', the subject of the chapter from which
this is taken.
--

"Observe, Shakespeare, in the midst of architecture and tombs of wood,
or freestone, or brass, naturally thinks of GOLD as the best
enriching and ennobling substance for them; in the midst also
of the fever of the Renaissance he writes, as every one else did,
in praise of precisely the most vicious master of that school--
Giulio Romano*; but the modern poet, living much in Italy,
and quit of the Renaissance influence, is able fully to enter into
the Italian feeling, and to see the evil of the Renaissance tendency,
not because he is greater than Shakespeare, but because he is in
another element, and has seen other things. . . .

--
* `Winter's Tale', V. 2. 106.
--

"I know no other piece of modern English, prose or poetry,
in which there is so much told, as in these lines {`The Bishop orders
his Tomb'}, 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 said
of the Central Renaissance in thirty pages of the `Stones of Venice'
put into as many lines, Browning's being also the antecedent work.
The worst of it is that this kind of concentrated writing needs
so much SOLUTION before the reader can fairly get the good of it,
that people