maker of a bas-relief contrives two or three planes of
figures for the presentation of his ruling group. Yet there appears to
my mind a defect of accomplishment, rather than a deliberate intention,
in the delineation of Orsino. He seems meant to be the wily, crafty,
Machiavellian reptile, whose calculating wickedness should form a
contrast to the daemonic, reckless, almost maniacal fiendishness of old
Francesco Cenci. But this conception of him wavers; his love for
Beatrice is too delicately tinted, and he is suffered to break down with
an infirmity of conscience alien to such a nature. On the other hand the
uneasy vacillations of Giacomo, and the irresolution, born of feminine
weakness and want of fibre, in Lucrezia, serve to throw the firm will of
Beatrice into prominent relief; while her innocence, sustained through
extraordinary suffering in circumstances of exceptional horror--the
innocence of a noble nature thrust by no act of its own but by its
wrongs beyond the pale of ordinary womankind--is contrasted with the
merely childish guiltlessness of Bernardo. Beatrice rises to her full
height in the fifth act, dilates and grows with the approach of danger,
and fills the whole scene with her spirit on the point of death. Her
sublime confidence in the justice and essential rightness of her action,
the glance of self-assured purity with which she annihilates the
cut-throat brought to testify against her, her song in prison, and her
tender solicitude for the frailer Lucrezia, are used with wonderful
dramatic skill for the fulfilment of a feminine ideal at once delicate
and powerful. Once and once only does she yield to ordinary weakness; it
is when the thought crosses her mind that she may meet her father in the
other world, as once he came to her on earth.

Shelley dedicated "The Cenci" to Leigh Hunt, saying that he had striven
in this tragedy to cast aside the subjective manner of his earlier work,
and to produce something at once more popular and more concrete, more
sober in style, and with a firmer grasp on the realities of life. He was
very desirous of getting it acted, and wrote to Peacock requesting him
to offer it at Covent Garden. Miss O'Neil, he thought, would play the
part of Beatrice admirably. The manager, however, did not take this
view; averring that the subject rendered it incapable of being even
submitted to an actress like Miss O'Neil. Shelley's self-criticism is
always so valuable, that it may be well h