Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/465

Rh have in addition to poems already mentioned such pieces as "The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's" (in which Ruskin finds embodied the very spirit of the Renascence;—I would modify, of one phase, and that the least noble, of it), "The Grammarian's Funeral" (embodying another and far nobler phase), "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha," "Pictor Ignotus," "Old Pictures at Florence," "The Heretic's Tragedy"—which, as the cheerful case of burning the Grand Master of the Templars alive, an astonishing Edinburgh reviewer complained was not rendered in a pleasing manner! For the present, we have such pieces as "The Lost Leader," "The Italian in England" and "The Englishman in Italy," the noble "Home Thoughts from the Sea," "Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr," the unique "Waring," "Mesmerism," "Bishop Blougram," "Caliban on Setebos," "Sludge the Medium," in addition to such longer works as "Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day," "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau," "Red-Cotton Nightcap-Country," "The Inn Album." And throughout all we have ever the dominant theme of the development or revelation of human souls; naturally most wonderful, and to myself simply overwhelming, in his immense masterpiece, "The Ring and the Book." In his power of transcendent analysis interfused with the power of synthetic exposition, so that we have no dissection of corpses, but an intellectual and moral vivisection, whose subjects grow the more living in their reality the more keenly the scalpel cuts into them, the more thoroughly they are anatomised, I know not of any contemporaries who can be compared with him save Balzac, Victor Hugo,