This sort of dramatic synthesis of a salient, historical epoch is
again strikingly disclosed in the following poem of the Renaissance
period, "The Bishop Orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church." In
this, again, the art-connoisseurship of the prelacy, so important
an element in the Italian movement towards art-expression, is
revealed to the life in the beauty-loving personality of the dying
bishop. And by means, also, of his social ties with his nephews,
called closer than they wish about him now; with her whom "men would
have to be their mother once"; with old Gandolf, whom he fancies
leering at him from his onion-stone tomb; and with all those strong
desires of the time for the delight of being envied, for marble
baths and horses and brown Greek manuscripts and mistresses, the
seeds of human decay planted in the plot of Time, known as the
Central Renaissance, by the same lingering fleshliness and
self-destroying self-indulgence as was at home in pagan days, are
livingly exposed to the historic sense.
Is the modern prelate portrayed in "Bishop Blougram's Apology," with
all his bland subtlety, complex culture, and ripened perceptions,
distant as the nineteenth century from the sixteenth, very different
at bottom from his Renaissance brother, in respect to his native
hankering for the pleasure of estimation above his fellows?
Gigadibs is his Gandolf, whom he would craftily overtop.
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