looking forward with gladness and vigour to
life--which has no relation whatever to the temper of Florentine or
Roman life during the age of the Medici. The bold brightness, moral
earnestness, pursuit of the ideal, spiritual intensity, reverence for
good work and for the man who did it, which breathe in the poem, differ
by a whole world from the atmosphere of life in _Andrea del Sarto_. This
is a crowd of men who are moving upwards, who, seizing the Renaissance
elements, knitted them through and through with reformation of life,
faith in God, and hope for man. They had a future and knew it. The
semi-paganism of the Renaissance had not, and did not know it had not.

We may close this series of Renaissance representations by _A Toccata of
Galuppi's_. It cannot take rank with the others as a representative
poem. It is of a different class; a changeful dream of images and
thoughts which came to Browning as he was playing a piece of
eighteenth-century Venetian music. But in the dream there is a sketch of
that miserable life of fruitless pleasure, the other side of which was
dishonourable poverty, into which Venetian society had fallen in the
eighteenth century. To this the pride, the irreligion, the immorality,
the desire of knowledge and beauty for their own sake alone, had brought
the noblest, wisest, and most useful city in Italy. That part of the
poem is representative. It is the end of such a society as is drawn in
_The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church_. That tomb is placed
in Rome, but it is in Venice that this class of tombs reached their
greatest splendour of pride, opulence, folly, debasement and irreligion.

Finally, there are a few poems which paint the thoughts, the sorrows,
the pleasures, and the political passions of modern Italy. There is the
_Italian in England_, full of love for the Italian peasant and of pity
for the patriot forced to live and die far from his motherland. Mazzini
used to read it to his fellow-exiles to show them how fully an English
poet could enter into the temper of their soul. So far it may be said to
represent a type. But it scarcely comes under the range of this chapter.
But _Up in a Villa, down in the City_, is so vivid a representation of
all that pleased a whole type of the city-bred and poor nobles of Italy
at the time when Browning wrote the _Dramatic Lyrics_ that I cannot omit
it. It is an admirable piece of work, crowded with keen descriptions of
nature in the Casen