All lapis, all, sons! Else I give the Pope
My villas! Will ye ever eat my heart?
Ever your eyes were as a lizard's quick,
They glitter like your mother's for my soul,
Or ye would heighten my impoverished frieze,
Piece out its starved design, and fill my vase
With grapes, and add a vizor and a Term,
And to the tripod ye would tie a lynx
That in his struggle throws the thyrsus down, 110
To comfort me on my entablature
Whereon I am to lie till I must ask
"Do I live, am I dead?" There, leave me, there!
For ye have stabbed me with ingratitude
To death--ye wish it--God, ye wish it! Stone--
Gritstone, a-crumble! Clammy squares which sweat
As if the corpse they keep were oozing through--
And no more lapis to delight the world!
Well go! I bless ye. Fewer tapers there,
But in a row: and, going, turn your backs 120
--Ay, like departing altar-ministrants,
And leave me in my church, the church for peace,
That I may watch at leisure if he leers--
Old Gandolf, at me, from his onion-stone,
As still he envied me, so fair she was!
NOTES
"The Bishop orders his Tomb" This half-delirious pleading of the
dying prelate for a tomb which shall gratify his luxurious artistic
tastes and personal rivalries, presents dramatically not merely the
special scene of the worldly old bishop's petulant struggle against
his failing power, and his collapse, finally, beneath the will of
his so-called nephews, it also illustrates a characteristic gross
form of the Renaissance spirit encumbered with Pagan survivals,
fleshly appetites, and selfish monopolizings which hampered its
development.
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