in the execution of the murder.  The interest of “The Cenci”, and it is overwhelmingly great, centres in Beatrice and her father; from these two chief actors in the drama, all the other characters fall away into greater or less degrees of unsubstantiality.  Perhaps Shelley intended this—­as the maker of a bas-relief contrives two or three planes of figures for the presentation of his ruling group.  Yet there appears to my mind a defect of accomplishment, rather than a deliberate intention, in the delineation of Orsino.  He seems meant to be the wily, crafty, Machiavellian reptile, whose calculating wickedness should form a contrast to the daemonic, reckless, almost maniacal fiendishness of old Francesco Cenci.  But this conception of him wavers; his love for Beatrice is too delicately tinted, and he is suffered to break down with an infirmity of conscience alien to such a nature.  On the other hand the uneasy vacillations of Giacomo, and the irresolution, born of feminine weakness and want of fibre, in Lucrezia, serve to throw the firm will of Beatrice into prominent relief; while her innocence, sustained through extraordinary suffering in circumstances of exceptional horror—­the innocence of a noble nature thrust by no act of its own but by its wrongs beyond the pale of ordinary womankind—­is contrasted with the merely childish guiltlessness of Bernardo.  Beatrice rises to her full height in the fifth act, dilates and grows with the approach of danger, and fills the whole scene with her spirit on the point of death.  Her sublime confidence in the justice and essential rightness of her action, the glance of self-assured purity with which she annihilates the cut-throat brought to testify against her, her song in prison, and her tender solicitude for the frailer Lucrezia, are used with wonderful dramatic skill for the fulfilment of a feminine ideal at once delicate and powerful.  Once and once only does she yield to ordinary weakness; it is when the thought crosses her mind that she may meet her father in the other world, as once he came to her on earth.

Shelley dedicated “The Cenci” to Leigh Hunt, saying that he had striven in this tragedy to cast aside the subjective manner of his earlier work, and to produce something at once more popular and more concrete, more sober in style, and with a firmer grasp on the realities of life.  He was very desirous of getting it acted, and wrote to Peacock requesting him to offer it at Covent Garden.  Miss O’Neil, he thought, would play the part of Beatrice admirably.  The manager, however, did not take this view; averring that the subject rendered it incapable of being even submitted to an actress like Miss O’Neil.  Shelley’s self-criticism is always so valuable, that it may be well here to collect what he said about the two great dramas of 1819.  Concerning “The Cenci” he wrote to Peacock:—­“It is written without any of the peculiar feelings and opinions which characterize my other compositions; I having attended simply to the impartial development