As scholars often note, the Victorian period was known for its didacticism, particularly the struggle between faith and moral decrepitude. While the Romantics idealized their world, the Victorians questioned their surroundings, choosing to politicize their literature so as to be reactionary against the social norm. Although the polemics of Victorianism were prevalent in poetry, fiction, philosophy, and nonfiction, their influence was never felt stronger than in the questionable, often satirical morality of Robert Browning's storytellers. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Of all Victorian poetry, Robert Browning's line is the most reproachful of moral conventions. Using historical figures as models for his critiques of the present, Browning masters the art of the monologue and soliloquy, two styles of poetry particularly useful for criticizing the character traits of his contemporaries. While poets like Matthew Arnold or Alfred, Lord Tennyson focused their polemics against ideas – human misery in “Dover Beach” and serious life philosophies in “Ulysses” – Browning wrote against individual entities and personalities, especially nobles and clerics . Browning's indictment of Anglican Church officials can be found through the aberration of his narrators in "The Bishop Orders His Tomb in the Church of Saint Praxed" and "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister". Browning paints these narrators as vain and vindictive personalities, character traits antithetical to a Spanish bishop or monk. In “The Bishop Orders His Tomb in the Church of St. Prasse,” the reader sees a frail man on his deathbed whose only concerns are his posterity. Traditionally, Renaissance bishops were concerned with spiritual affairs, preferring a reward in heaven above any earthly joy. Browning's bishop, however, is so concerned with earthly affairs that all heavenly matters seem null and void to him. He is proud of the "agate", "granite", "basalt" and "marble" that will build his tomb, something he considers worthy of veneration. This tomb constitutes a stark contrast to the place where Christ was buried, something conventionally seen as sterile and devoid of any superfluities. Although a grave, especially a premortem, is known as an absence of personality, the bishop leads the reader in a different direction. According to his wanderings, his tomb is an object that will, in essence, attempt to make him as immortal as the deity he claims to have lived his life for. The bishop's contempt for the affairs of the afterlife is also present in the egalitarianism with which he treats the dead. At the end of the poem, the bishop says: "Old Gandolf, towards me, from his onion stone / How still he envied me, so fair was she!" His depiction of Gandolf's corpse indicates the egalitarian mentality with which he views the physicality of death; however, this portrayal succeeds over 100 lines of self-congratulation. Although death itself acts as an equalizer, the bishop's tomb serves as a celebrator of a singular life, something antithetical to both the church and Victorian concepts of morality. When you ask, “Am I alive, am I dead?”, you are essentially confusing death with life. His life has become so extravagant that the rewards of salvation are overshadowed by the rewards of his past. This nebulous vision of heaven showcases his rampant selfishness and prodigality, two traits that are not typically associated with bishops. Although the narrator in "The bishop orders his tomb in the church of San Praxesus" goes against some clichés of the typical.