from the hill, Florence wears the
grey hue of the heart of Andrea; and Browning weaves the autumn and the
night into the tragedy of the painter's life.

That tragedy was pitiful. Andrea del Sarto was a faultless painter and a
weak character; and it fell to his lot to love with passion a faithless
woman. His natural weakness was doubled by the weakness engendered by
unconquerable passion; and he ruined his life, his art, and his honour,
to please his wife. He wearied her, as women are wearied, by passion
unaccompanied by power; and she endured him only while he could give her
money and pleasures. She despised him for that endurance, and all the
more that he knew she was guilty, but said nothing lest she should leave
him. Browning fills his main subject--his theory of the true aim of
art--with this tragedy; and his treatment of it is a fine example of his
passionate humanity; and the passion of it is knitted up with close
reasoning and illuminated by his intellectual play.

It is worth a reader's while to read, along with this poem, Alfred de
Musset's short play, _Andre del Sarto_. The tragedy of the situation is
deepened by the French poet, and the end is told. Unlike Browning, only
a few lines sketch the time, its temper, and its art. It is the depth of
the tragedy which De Musset paints, and that alone; and in order to
deepen it, Andrea is made a much nobler character than he is in
Browning's poem. The betrayal is also made more complete, more
overwhelming. Lucretia is false to Andrea with his favourite pupil, with
Cordiani, to whom he had given all he had, whom he loved almost as much
as he loved his wife. Terrible, inevitable Fate broods over this brief
and masterly little play.

The next of these imaginative representations of the Renaissance is,
_The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church_. We are placed in
the full decadence of the Renaissance. Its total loss of religion, even
in the Church; its immorality--the bishop's death-bed is surrounded by
his natural sons and the wealth he leaves has been purchased by every
kind of iniquity--its pride of life; its luxury; its semi-Paganism; its
imitative classicism; its inconsistency; its love of jewels, and fine
stones, and rich marbles; its jealousy and envy; its pleasure in the
adornment of death; its delight in the outsides of things, in mere
workmanship; its loss of originality; its love of scholarship for
scholarship's sake alone; its contempt of the common