drawn and finally blotted out; when, as the century passed into the
next, the Church led the revolt against decency, order, and morality;
when scepticism took the place of faith, even of duty, and criticism the
place of authority, then Browning became interested, not of course in
the want of faith and in immorality, but in the swift variety and
intensity of the movement of intellectual and social life, and in the
interlacing changes of the movement. This was an enchanting world for
him, and as he was naturally most interested in the arts, he represented
the way in which the main elements of the Renaissance appeared to him in
poems which were concerned with music, poetry, painting and the rest of
the arts, but chiefly with painting. Of course, when the Renaissance
began to die down into senile pride and decay, Browning, who never
ceased to choose and claim companionship with vigorous life, who
abhorred decay either in Nature or nations, in societies or in cliques
of culture, who would have preferred a blood-red pirate to the daintiest
of decadents--did not care for it, and in only one poem, touched with
contemptuous pity and humour, represented its disease and its
disintegrating elements, with so much power, however, with such grasping
mastery, that it is like a painting by Velasquez. Ruskin said justly
that the _Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church_ concentrated
into a few lines all the evil elements of the Renaissance. But this want
of care for the decaying Renaissance was contrasted by the extreme
pleasure with which he treated its early manhood in _Fra Lippo Lippi_.

The Renaissance had a life and seasons, like those of a human being. It
went through its childhood and youth like a boy of genius under the care
of parents from whose opinions and mode of life he is sure to sever
himself in the end; but who, having made a deep impression on his
nature, retain power over, and give direction to, his first efforts at
creation. The first art of the Renaissance, awakened by the discovery of
the classic remnants, retained a great deal of the faith and
superstition, the philosophy, theology, and childlike _naivete_ of the
middle ages. Its painting and sculpture, but chiefly the first of these,
gave themselves chiefly to the representation of the soul upon the face,
and of the untutored and unconscious movements of the body under the
influence of religious passion; that is, such movements as expressed
devotion, fervent l