Luria is a noble Moor who commands the armies of Florence against Pisa, and conquers Pisa.  He is in love with the city of Florence as a man is with a woman.  Its beauty, history, great men, and noble buildings attract his Eastern nature, by their Northern qualities, as much as they repel his friend and countryman Husain.  He lives for her with unbroken faithfulness, and he dies for her with piteous tenderness when he finds out that Florence distrusts him.  When he is suspected of treachery, his heart breaks, and to explain his broken heart, he dies.  There is no other way left to show to Florence that he has always been true to her.  And at the moment of his death, all who spied on him, distrusted and condemned him, are convinced of his fidelity.  Even before he dies, his devotion to his ideal aim, his absolute unselfishness, have won over and ennobled all the self-interested characters which surround him—­Puccio, the general who is jealous of him; Domizia, the woman who desires to use him as an instrument of her hate to Florence; even Braccio, the Macchiavellian Florentine who thinks his success must be dangerous to the state.  Luria conquers them all.  It is the triumph of self-forgetfulness.  And the real aim of the play is not dramatic.  It is too isolated an aim to be dramatic.  It is to build up and image the noble character of Luria, and it reaches that end with dignity.

The other characters are but foils to enhance the solitary greatness of Luria.  Braccio is a mere voice, a theory who talks, and, at the end, when he becomes more human, he seems to lose his intelligence.  The Secretaries have no individuality.  Domizia causes nothing, and might with advantage be out of the play.  However, when, moved by the nobleness of Luria, she gives up her revenge on Florence, she speaks well, and her outburst is poetical.  Puccio is a real personage, but a poor fellow.  Tiburzio is a pale reflection of Luria.  Husain alone has some personality, but even his Easternness, which isolates him, is merged in his love of Luria.  All of them only exist to be the scaffolding by means of which Luria’s character is built into magnificence, and they disappear from our sight, like scaffolding, when the building is finished.

There are fine things in the poem:  the image of Florence; its men, its streets, its life as seen by the stranger-eyes of Luria; the contrast between the Eastern and the Latin nature; the picture of hot war; the sudden friendship of Luria and Tiburzio, the recognition in a moment of two high hearts by one another; the picture of Tiburzio fighting at the ford, of Luria tearing the letter among the shamed conspirators; the drawing of the rough honest soldier-nature in Puccio, and, chief of all, the vivid historic painting of the time and the type of Italian character at the time of the republics.

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