by that ecclesiastical hypocrisy which triumphed in the same; such an audience were at the right point of sympathy with a poet who undertook to lay the springs of Southern villany before them bare in a dramatic action.  But, as the old proverb puts it, ’Inglese Italianato e un diavolo incarnato.’  ’An Englishman assuming the Italian habit is a devil in the flesh.’  The Italians were depraved, but spiritually feeble.  The English playwright, when he brought them on the stage, arrayed with intellectual power and gleaming with the lurid splendour of a Northern fancy, made them tenfold darker and more terrible.  To the subtlety and vices of the South he added the melancholy, meditation, and sinister insanity of his own climate.  He deepened the complexion of crime and intensified lawlessness by robbing the Italian character of levity.  Sin, in his conception of that character, was complicated with the sense of sin, as it never had been in a Florentine or a Neapolitan.  He had not grasped the meaning of the Machiavellian conscience, in its cold serenity and disengagement from the dread of moral consequence.  Not only are his villains stealthy, frigid, quick to evil, merciless, and void of honour; but they brood upon their crimes and analyse their motives.  In the midst of their audacity they are dogged by dread of coming retribution.  At the crisis of their destiny they look back upon their better days with intellectual remorse.  In the execution of their bloodiest schemes they groan beneath the chains of guilt they wear, and quake before the phantoms of their haunted brains.

Thus passion and reflection, superstition and profanity, deliberate atrocity and fear of judgment, are united in the same nature; and to make the complex still more strange, the play-wright has gifted these tremendous personalities with his own wild humour and imaginative irony.  The result is almost monstrous, such an ideal of character as makes earth hell.  And yet it is not without justification.  To the Italian text has been added the Teutonic commentary, and both are fused by a dramatic genius into one living whole.

One of these men is Flamineo, the brother of Vittoria Corombona, upon whose part the action of the ‘White Devil’ depends.  He has been bred in arts and letters at the university of Padua; but being poor and of luxurious appetites, he chooses the path of crime in courts for his advancement.  A duke adopts him for his minion, and Flamineo acts the pander to this great man’s lust.  He contrives the death of his brother-in-law, suborns a doctor to poison the Duke’s wife, and arranges secret meetings between his sister and the paramour who is to make her fortune and his own.  His mother appears like a warning Ate to prevent her daughter’s crime.  In his rage he cries: 

  What fury raised thee up?  Away, away!

And when she pleads the honour of their house he answers: 

                        Shall I,
  Having a path so open and so free
  To my preferment, still retain your milk
  In my pale forehead?