The Renaissance society may have built up more men of this type than ours, but they are not peculiar to it.
Germany, not Italy, is, I think, the country in which Browning intended to place two other poems which belong to the time of the Renaissance--_Johannes Agricola in Meditation_ and _A Grammarian's Funeral_.

Their note is as different from that of the Italian poems as the national temper of Germany is from that of Italy.

They have no sense of beauty for beauty's sake alone.

Their atmosphere is not soft or gay but somewhat stern.

The logical arrangement of them is less one of feeling than of thought.