this has been achieved with only moderate success.  Vittoria is abandoned to the darkest interpretation.  She is a woman who rises to eminence by crime, as an unfaithful wife, the murderess of her husband, and an impudent defier of justice.  Her brother, Flamineo, becomes under Webster’s treatment one of those worst human infamies—­a court dependent; ruffian, buffoon, pimp, murderer by turns.  Furthermore, and without any adequate object beyond that of completing this study of a type he loved, Webster makes him murder his own brother Marcello by treason.  The part assigned to Marcello, it should be said, is a genial and happy one; and Cornelia, the mother of the Accoramboni, is a dignified character, pathetic in her suffering.  Webster, it may be added, treats the Cardinal Monticelso as allied in some special way to the Medici.  Yet certain traits in his character, especially his avoidance of bloodshed and the tameness of his temper after Camillo has been murdered, seem to have been studied from the historical Sixtus.

III

The character of the ‘White Devil, or Vittoria Corombona,’ is perhaps the most masterly creation of Webster’s genius.  Though her history is a true one in its leading incidents, the poet, while portraying a real personage, has conceived an original individuality.  It is impossible to know for certain how far the actual Vittoria was guilty of her first husband’s murder.  Her personality fails to detach itself from the romance of her biography by any salient qualities.  But Webster, with true playwright’s instinct, casts aside historical doubts, and delineates in his heroine a woman of a very marked and terrible nature.  Hard as adamant, uncompromising, ruthless, Vittoria follows ambition as the loadstar of her life.  It is the ambition to reign as Duchess, far more than any passion for a paramour, which makes her plot Camillo’s and Isabella’s murders, and throws her before marriage into Brachiano’s arms.  Added to this ambition, she is possessed with the cold demon of her own imperial and victorious beauty.  She has the courage of her criminality in the fullest sense; and much of the fascination with which Webster has invested her, depends upon her dreadful daring.  Her portrait is drawn with full and firm touches.  Although she appears but five times on the scene, she fills it from the first line of the drama to the last.  Each appearance adds effectively to the total impression.  We see her first during a criminal interview with Brachiano, contrived by her brother Flamineo.  The plot of the tragedy is developed in this scene; Vittoria suggesting, under the metaphor of a dream, that her lover should compass the deaths of his duchess and her husband.  The dream is told with deadly energy and ghastly picturesqueness.  The cruel sneer at its conclusion, murmured by a voluptuous woman in the ears of an impassioned paramour, chills us with the sense of concentrated vice.  Her next