Terrible, inevitable Fate broods over this brief and masterly little play.
The next of these imaginative representations of the Renaissance is, _The Bishop orders his Tomb at St.Praxed's Church_.

We are placed in the full decadence of the Renaissance.

Its total loss of religion, even in the Church; its immorality--the bishop's death-bed is surrounded by his natural sons and the wealth he leaves has been purchased by every kind of iniquity--its pride of life; its luxury; its semi-Paganism; its imitative classicism; its inconsistency; its love of jewels, and fine stones, and rich marbles; its jealousy and envy; its pleasure in the adornment of death; its delight in the outsides of things, in mere workmanship; its loss of originality; its love of scholarship for scholarship's sake alone; its contempt of the common people; its exhaustion--are one and all revealed or suggested in this astonishing poem.
These are the three greater poems dedicated to this period; but there are some minor poems which represent different phases of its life.

One of these is the _Pictor Ignotus_.

There must have been many men, during the vital time of the Renaissance, who, born, as it were, into the art-ability of the period, reached without trouble a certain level in painting, but who had no genius, who could not create; or who, if they had some touch of genius, had no boldness to strike it into fresh forms of beauty; shy, retiring men, to whom the criticism of the world was a pain they knew they could not bear.