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It furnished him especially with a great variety of ecclesiastical types, such as are painted in Fra Lippo Lippi, The Heretic's Tragedy, and The Bishop Orders his Tomb in St. Praxed's Church. Browning's dramatic instinct always attracted him to the stage. His tragedy, Strafford , was written for Macready, and put on at Covent Garden Theater, but without pronounced success.
In the midst of it, in a filthy, half modern, crowded street, a rugged Lombard church porch, dark ages all over: the object of my search, St. Praxed's church; but it was walled up, and I entered by a door in a side lane. Entered to remain on threshold, a Mass at a side altar.
Praxed's Church" it is not Tennyson and Browning themselves who are talking, but imaginary persons viewed objectively, as far as Tennyson and Browning were capable of such objectivity. The next step would be the Drama, preoccupied with characters in action the "world of men," in short, and not the personal subjective world of the highly sensitized lyric poet.
There, creeps Fra Lippo Lippi with his cheeks still burning from some girl's hot kiss. There, stands dread Saul with the lordly male-sapphires gleaming in his turban. Mildred Tresham is there, and the Spanish monk, yellow with hatred, and Blougram, and Ben Ezra, and the Bishop of St. Praxed's.
Praxed's one Pan is carved, and Moses with the tables; upon the gravestone of an Albanian chief they scratch his rifle and his horse; and over the slave's low mound in Angola plantations his basket and mattock are laid, lest he should miss them. So various are the devices contrived for the solace of mankind, or for his instruction.
The tone of indifference with which the question was put was not lost upon Alice, but she was too much interested in the conversation to pay heed to it. She said: 'I read nearly all Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and Browning I think I like him better than all the poets! Do you know the scene at St. Praxed's? 'Yes, of course; it is very fine.
Certain social conditions are studied as they enter into and help to form an individual. The Bishop who orders his tomb at St Praxed's is in part a product of the Italian Renaissance, but the causes are seen only in their effects upon the character of a representative person.
If the Bishop, who orders his tomb at St Praxed's, serves to represent the sensuous glory and the moral void of one phase of the Italian Renaissance, so, and with equal fidelity, does Mr Sludge represent a phase of nineteenth century materialism and moral grossness, which cannot extinguish the cravings of the soul but would vulgarise and degrade them with coarse illusions.
The 'Two Bishops'; the sixteenth century one ordering his tomb of jasper and basalt in St. Praxed's Church, and his nineteenth century successor rolling out his post-prandial Apologia. 'My Last Duchess, the 'Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister, 'Andrea del Sarto, 'Fra Lippo Lippi, 'Rabbi Ben Ezra, 'Cleon, 'A Death in the Desert, 'The Italian in England, and 'The Englishman in Italy.
Whereas a portrait of the man in life, as the throning popes in St. Peter's, seems heartless and derisive; such monuments striking us as conceived and ordered by their inmates while alive, like Michael Angelo's Pope Julius, and Browning's Bishop, who was so preoccupied about his tomb in St. Praxed's Church.
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