Ruskin gives this poem high praise: "Robert Browning is unerring in
every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages.... I know no other piece
of modern English prose or poetry in which there is so much told,
as in these lines, of the Renaissance spirit--its worldliness,
inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of
luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all that I have said of the
central Renaissance, in thirty pages of _The Stones of Venice_,
put into as many lines; Browning's also being the antecedent work."
It is not, however, for its historical accuracy that a poem is mainly
to be judged. The full and imaginative portrayal of a type, belonging
not to one age only, but to human nature, is a greater achievement.
And this achievement Browning has undoubtedly performed.
5. =Old Gandolf=. Evidently one of the Bishop's colleagues in holy
orders, and like him in holiness.
31. =onion-stone=. See the dictionary for descriptions of this and
other stones named in the poem.