The semi-paganism of the Renaissance had not, and did not know it had not.
We may close this series of Renaissance representations by _A Toccata of Galuppi's_.

It cannot take rank with the others as a representative poem.

It is of a different class; a changeful dream of images and thoughts which came to Browning as he was playing a piece of eighteenth-century Venetian music.

But in the dream there is a sketch of that miserable life of fruitless pleasure, the other side of which was dishonourable poverty, into which Venetian society had fallen in the eighteenth century.

To this the pride, the irreligion, the immorality, the desire of knowledge and beauty for their own sake alone, had brought the noblest, wisest, and most useful city in Italy.