In this poem Browning has called up before us the whole aspect of Venetian life in the eighteenth century.  In three other poems, among the most remarkable that he has ever written, A Grammarian’s Funeral, The Heretic’s Tragedy and Holy-Cross Day, he has realised and represented the life and temper of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. A Grammarian’s Funeral, “shortly after the Revival of Learning in Europe,” gives the nobler spirit of the earlier pioneers of the Renaissance, men like Cyriac of Ancona and Filelfo, devoted pedants who broke ground in the restoration to the modern world of the civilisation and learning of ancient Greece and Rome.  It gives this, the nobler and earlier spirit, as finely as The Tomb at St. Praxed’s gives the later and grosser.  In Browning’s hands the figure of the old grammarian becomes heroic.  “He settled Hoti’s business,” true; but he did something more than that.  It is the spirit in which the work is done, rather than the special work itself, here only relatively important, which is glorified.  Is it too much to say that this is the noblest of all requiems ever chanted over the grave of the scholar?

“Here’s the top peak; the multitude below
Live, for they can, there: 
This man decided not to Live but Know—­
Bury this man there. 
Here—­here’s his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
Lightnings are loosened,
Stars come and go!  Let joy break with the storm,
Peace let the dew send! 
Lofty designs must close in like effects: 
Loftily lying,
Leave him—­still loftier than the world suspects,
Living or dying.”

The union of humour with intense seriousness, of the grotesque with the stately, is one that only Browning could have compassed, and the effect is singularly appropriate.  As the disciples of the old humanist bear their dead master up to his grave on the mountain-top, chanting their dirge and eulogy, the lines of the poem seem actually to move to the steady climbing rhythm of their feet.

The Heretic’s Tragedy:  a Middle-Age Interlude, is described by the author as “a glimpse from the burning of Jacques du Bourg-Molay [last Grand-Master of the Templars], A.D. 1314, as distorted by the refraction from Flemish brain to brain during the course of a couple of centuries.”  Of all Browning’s mediaeval poems this is perhaps the greatest, as it is certainly the most original, the most astonishing.  Its special “note” is indescribable, for there is nothing with which we can compare it.  If I say that it is perhaps the finest example in English poetry of the pure grotesque, I shall fail to interpret it aright to those who think of the grotesque as a synonym for the ugly and debased.  If I call it fantastic, I shall do it less than justice in suggesting a certain lightness and flimsiness which are quite alien to its profound seriousness, a seriousness which touches on sublimity.  Browning’s power