a
brilliantly ingenious _tour de force_; and the rough humour is quite in
keeping with the _dramatis persona_. In complete contrast to _Master
Hugues_ is _A Toccata of Galuppi's_,[31] one of the daintiest, most
musical, most witching and haunting of Browning's poems, certainly one
of his masterpieces as a lyric poet. It is a vision of Venice evoked
from the shadowy Toccata, a vision of that delicious, brilliant,
evanescent, worldly life, when

"Balls and masks began at midnight, burning ever to midday,"

and the lover and his lady would break off their talk to listen while
Galuppi

"Sat and played Toccatas, stately at the clavichord."

But "the eternal note of sadness" soon creeps in.

"Yes, you, like a ghostly cricket, creaking where a house was burned:
'Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.

* * * * *

Dust and ashes!' So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too--what's become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old."

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 the