Old Aunt Lapaccia trussed me with one hand,
      (Its fellow was a stinger as I knew)
      And so along the wall, over the bridge,
      By the straight cut to the convent.  Six words there,
      While I stood munching my first bread that month: 
      ‘So, boy, you’re minded,’ quoth the good fat father,
      Wiping his own mouth, ’twas refection-time,—­
      ‘To quit this very miserable world?’”

But not only has Browning given a wonderfully realistic portrait of the man; a man to whom life in its fulness was the only joy, a true type of the Renaissance spirit, metamorphosed by ironic fate into a monk; he has luminously indicated the true end and aim of art and the false asceticism of so-called “religious” art, in the characteristic comments and confessions of an innovator in the traditions of religious painting.

Cleon is prefaced by the text “As certain also of your own poets have said” (Acts, xvii. 28), and is supposed to be a letter from one of the poets to whom St. Paul refers, addressed to Protus, an imaginary “Tyrant,” whose wondering admiration of Cleon’s many-sided culture has drawn him to one who is at once poet, painter, sculptor, musician and philosopher.  Compared with such poems as Andrea del Sarto, there is little realisable detail in the course of the calm argument or statement, but I scarcely see how the temper of the time, among its choicest spirits (the time of classic decadence, of barren culture, of fruitless philosophy) could well have been more finely shadowed forth.  The quality of the versification, unique here as in every one of the five great poems, is perfectly adapted to the subject.  The slow sweep of the verse, its stately melody, its large, clear, classic harmony, enable us to receive the right impression as admirably as the other qualities, already pointed out, enable us to feel the resigned sadness of Andrea and the jovial gusto of Lippo.  In Cleon we have a historical picture, imaginary indeed, but typical.  It reveals or records the religious feeling of the pagan world at the time of the coming of Christ; its sadness, dissatisfaction and expectancy, and the failure of its wisdom to fathom the truths of the new Gospel.

In An Epistle containing the strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician, we have perhaps a yet more subtle delineation of a character similar by contrast.  Cleon is a type of the Western and sceptical, Karshish of the Eastern and believing, attitude of mind; the one repellent, the other absorbent, of new things offered for belief.  Karshish, “the picker up of learning’s crumbs,” writes from Syria to his master at home, “Abib, all sagacious in our art,” concerning a man whose singular case has fascinated him, one Lazarus of Bethany.  There are few more lifelike and subtly natural narratives in Browning’s poetry; few more absolutely interpenetrated by the finest imaginative sympathy.  The scientific