blood mounts and adds a lustre to her cheek. It is no flush
of modesty, but of rebellious indignation. The Cardinal, who hates
her, brands her emotion with the name of shame. She rebukes him,
hurling a jibe at his own mother. And when they point with spiteful
eagerness to the jewels blazing on her breast, to the silks and satins
that she rustles in, her husband lying murdered, she retorts:

Had I foreknown his death, as you suggest, I would have
bespoke my mourning.

She is condemned, but not vanquished, and leaves the court with a
stinging sarcasm. They send her to a house of Convertites:

_V.C_. A house of Convertites! what's that?

_M_. A house of penitent whores.

_V.C_. Do the noblemen of Rome Erect it for their wives,
that I am sent To lodge there?

Charles Lamb was certainly in error? when he described Vittoria's
attitude as one of 'innocence-resembling boldness.' In the trial
scene, no less than in the scenes of altercation with Brachiano and
Flamineo, Webster clearly intended her to pass for a magnificent
vixen, a beautiful and queenly termagant. Her boldness is the audacity
of impudence, which does not condescend to entertain the thought of
guilt. Her egotism is so hard and so profound that the very victims
whom she sacrifices to ambition seem in her sight justly punished. Of
Camillo and Isabella, her husband and his wife, she says to Brachiano:

And both were struck dead by that sacred yew, In that base
shallow grave that was their due.

IV

It is tempting to pass from this analysis of Vittoria's life to a
consideration of Webster's drama as a whole, especially in a book
dedicated to Italian byways. For that mysterious man of genius had
explored the dark and devious paths of Renaissance vice, and had
penetrated the secrets of Italian wickedness with truly appalling
lucidity. His tragedies, though worthless as historical documents,
have singular value as commentaries upon history, as revelations to us
of the spirit of the sixteenth century in its deepest gloom.

Webster's plays, owing to the condensation of their thought and the
compression of their style, are not easy to read for the first time.
He crowds so many fantastic incidents into one action, and burdens his
discourse with so much profoundly studied matter, that we rise from
the perusal of his works with a blurred impression of the fables, a
deep sense of the poet's power and personality, and an inef