1828.] The White Devil; or; Vittoria Corombona. 133 
Gas. Are you so brave? 
Vit. Yes; 1 shall welcome death 
As princes do some great ambassador : 
I'll meet thy weapon half way. 
Lud. Thou dost tremble. 
Methinks fear should dissolve thee into air. 
Vit. O, thou art deceived ; I am too true a woman : 
Conceit can never kill me. I'll tell thee what— 
I will not in my death shed one base tear ; 
Or if look pale, for want of blood, not fear. 
Almost immediately after this, they receive their death at the hands of 
Ludovico and Gasparo; and there is nothing finer in its way than the 
manner in which they severally entertain it. Both falter for an instant, 
as the blood flows from them, and may be supposed to carry with it that 
which supports their great spirits ; but Flamineo recovers again the next 
instant, and dies as he has lived ; while Vittoria so meets her end, that 
we are compelled to remember who and what she is: still beautiful, 
- young, and a woman; and therefore, capable of living in a perpetual 
triumph over her guilt, but not of dying so:—“ My soul!” (she ex- 
claims )— 
« My soul, like to a ship in a black storm, 
: Is tost I know not whither.” 
But with Flamineo it is different. All his ambitious hopes of great- 
ness are dead within him ; and why, therefore, should he look on death 
itself, in any other light than asa relief from life ? 
Flam. I recover, like a spent 
Taper, for a flash, and instantly go out. 
’Tis well yet there’s some goodness in my death : 
My life was a black charnel. I have caught 
An everlasting cold: I have lost my voice 
Most irrecoverably! Farewell, glorious villains ! 
This busy trade of life appears most vain, 
Since rest breeds rest, where all seek pain by pain. 
Let no harsh flattering bells resound my knell— 
4 - Strike, thunder, and strike loud, to my farewell! (He dies.) 
__ In closing our notice of this play, we should not leave a just impression 
of it upon the reader’s mind, if we did not recur, for a moment, to its 
glaring and manifold faults ; faults, however, which are, for the most 
art, those of a man of genius. It is overloaded with matter, so as to be 
_ in many parts confused, and almost unintelligible. However admirable 
_ in separate scenes and characters, it is ill digested in the plot and general 
construction, so that it leaves little distinct impression as a consistent 
whole. And fnally, there is an off-hand indifference and carelessness, 
_ the frequent result of conscious natural powers and accumulated re- 
- sources, which unhappily prevents the employment of those powers and 
resources to that noble end which they might have attained. We are 
very apt to close a work of this description under feelings which, how- 
ever the manifestation of them might have satisfied the author, are any 
but gratifying to those who experience them. Instead of receiving 
delight and gratitude that which he has done for us, and resting 
with the contemplation of that, we presently put aside what is, 
ger, and dwell only upon what we imagine might have been, but is 
hving conquered for us a noble province in the realms of mind, 
we complain that it is not a kingdom ; and if it had been a Kingdom, we 
hould have been equally dissatisfied because it was not a world. 
* 
