Throughout the first wonderful love-scene with Fedalma, the vital difference, the essential antagonism between these two natures, is revealed to us through a hundred subtle and delicate touches, and we are made to feel that there is a depth in hers beyond the power of his to reach.  Chivalrous, absorbing, tyrannising over his whole being, even pure as his love is, it far fails of the deeper and holier purity of hers.  It shudders at the possibility of even outward soil upon her loveliness; but it does so primarily because such soil would react upon his self-love:—­

   “Have I not made your place and dignity
   The very height of my ambition?”

Her nobler nature recoils with chill foreboding terror from his first breach of trust, because it is a fall from his truest and highest right.  His answer to her question already quoted, reveals a love which the world’s judgment may rank as the best and noblest, but reveals a principle which, applied to aught beneath the only and supremest good, makes love only a more insidious and deeply corrupting form of self-pleasing:  “’Tis what I love determines how I love.”  Love is his “highest allegiance”; and it becomes ere long an allegiance before which truth, faith, and honour give way, and guidance and control of conscience are swept before the fierce storm of self-willed passion that brooks no interposition between itself and its aim.

We are not attempting a formal review of this work; and as we have passed without notice the powerful embodiment in Father Isidor of whatever was true and earnest in the Inquisition, we must also pass very slightly over the interview with a still more remarkable creation—­the Hebrew physician and astrologer Sephardo—­except as we have in this interview further illustration of the character of Don Silva, and of the direction in which the self-love of passion is impelling him.  We see conscience seeking from Sephardo—­and seeking in vain—­confirmation of the purpose already determined in his own heart; striving toward self-justification by every sophistry the passion-blinded intellect can suggest; struggling to transfer to another the wrong, if not the shame, of his own contemplated breach of trust; endeavouring to take refuge in stellar and fatalistic agencies from his own “nature quiveringly poised” between good and evil; and at last, merging all sophistries and all influences in the fierce resolve of the self-love which has made Fedalma the one aim, glory, and crown of his life.  Throughout all the apparent struggle and uncertainty, we never doubt how all shall end.  Amid all the appearances of vacillation, all the seeking external aid and furtherance, we see that the resolve is fixed, that the eager passionate self which identifies Fedalma as its inalienable right and property will prevail—­prevail even to set aside every obstacle of duty and right which shall seem to interpose between it and realisation.