[Footnote 84: It is also, and perhaps chiefly, in this case, a pun on
the meaning of the plural noun "cenci," "rags," or "old rags." The cry
of this, frequent in Rome, was at first mistaken by Shelley for a voice
urging him to go on with his play. Mr. Browning has used it to indicate
the comparative unimportance of his contribution to the Cenci story. The
quoted Italian proverb means something to the same effect: that every
trifle will press in for notice among worthier matters.]

[Footnote 85: That of the Gregorian chant: a cadence concluding on the
dominant instead of the key-note.]

[Footnote 86: We have a conspicuous instance of this in "Pippa Passes."]

[Footnote 87: This spontaneous mode of conception may seem incompatible
with the systematic adherence to a fixed class of subjects referred to
in an earlier chapter. But it by no means is so. With Mr. Browning the
spontaneous creative impulse conforms to the fixed rule.

The present remarks properly belong to that earlier chapter. But it was
difficult to divide them from their illustrations.]

[Footnote 88: First in "Hood's Magazine."]

[Footnote 89: I may venture to state that these picturesque materials
included a tower which Mr. Browning once saw in the Carrara Mountains, a
painting which caught his eye years later in Paris; and the figure of a
horse in the tapestry in his own drawing-room--welded together in the
remembrance of the line from "King Lear" which forms the heading of the
poem.]