and characters are perhaps more interesting and affecting than in any other of the plays; while the effect of the whole is impressive from its unity.  The scene is English; the time, somewhere in the eighteenth century; the motive, family honour and dishonour.  The story appeals to ready popular emotions, emotions which, though lying nearest the surface, are also the most deeply-rooted.  The whole action is passionately pathetic, and it is infused with a twofold tragedy, the tragedy of the sin, and that of the misunderstanding, the last and final tragedy, which hangs on a word, spoken only when too late to save three lives.  This irony of circumstance, while it is the source of what is saddest in human discords, is also the motive of what has come to be the only satisfying harmony in dramatic art.  It takes the place, in our modern world, of the Necessity of the Greeks; and is not less impressive because it arises from the impulse and unreasoning wilfulness of man rather than from the implacable insistency of God.  It is with perfect justice, both moral and artistic, that the fatal crisis, though mediately the result of accident, of error, is shown to be the consequence and the punishment of wrong.  A tragedy resulting from the mistakes of the wholly innocent would jar on our sense of right, and could never produce a legitimate work of art.  Even Oedipus suffers, not merely because he is under the curse of a higher power, but because he is wilful, and rushes upon his own fate.  Timon suffers, not because he was generous and good, but from the defects of his qualities.  So, in this play, each of the characters calls down upon his own head the suffering which at first seems to be a mere caprice and confusion of chance.  Mildred Tresham and Henry Mertoun, both very young, ignorant and unguarded, have loved.  They attempt a late reparation, apparently with success, but the hasty suspicion of Lord Tresham, Mildred’s brother, diverted indeed into a wrong channel, brings down on both a terrible retribution.  Tresham, who shares the ruin he causes, feels, too, that his punishment is his due.  He has acted without pausing to consider, and he is called on to pay the penalty of “evil wrought by want of thought.”

The character of Mildred, a woman “more sinned against than sinning,” is exquisitely and tenderly drawn.  We see her, and we see and feel

                 “The good and tender heart,
      Its girl’s trust and its woman’s constancy,
      How pure yet passionate, how calm yet kind,
      How grave yet joyous, how reserved yet free
      As light where friends are”—­

as her brother, in a memorable passage, describes her.  She is so thrillingly alive, so beautiful and individual, so pathetic and pitiful in her desolation.  Every word she speaks comes straight from her heart to ours.  “I know nothing that is so affecting,” wrote Dickens in a letter to Forster, “nothing in any book I have ever read, as Mildred’s recurrence to that ‘I was so young—­had no mother.’  I know no love like it, no passion like it, no moulding of a splendid thing after its conception like it."[22] Not till Pompilia do we find so pathetic a portrait of a woman.