poetical, neither swells into bombast nor
descends to the foppery so common among the verse-makers of our day.
There is a stately, old-fashioned tread in the diction, as of a man in
armor, who, should he attempt to gather flowers of mere prettiness,
would crush them at the first touch of his iron gauntlet, and who, if
he seems to move ungracefully at times, owes his motion to his weight
of mail. Calaynos, the hero, is in every respect a nobleman, not only
in blood, but what is better, in mind. He is a scholar, one who, in
the words of Dona Alda his wife,

--uses time as usurers do their gold,
Making each moment pay him double interest.

He is a philosopher--

Things nigh impossible are plain to him;
His trenchant will, like a fine-tempered blade,
With unturned edge, cleaves through the baser iron.

He is generous and has

--a predetermined trust in man;

and holds that

He who hates man must scorn the Source of man,
And challenge as unwise his awful Maker.

The character of Dona Alda is noble and womanly--her chief trait being
her great pride and jealous care of her honor. She conceives that no
one will brave the

--peril, such as he must brook,
Who dares to love the wife of great Calaynos.

Her maid, Martina, tells her that

--Queens of Spain
Have had their paramours--

and she replies,

--So might it be,
_Yet never hap to bride of a Calaynos_!

Don Luis, the villain of the plot, thus paints his own picture:

--I was not formed for good:
To what Fate orders I must needs submit:
The sin not mine, but His who made me thus--
Not in my will but in my nature lodged.

* * * * *

I will grasp the stable goods of life,
Nor care how foul the hand that does the deed.

Martina is admirably drawn; her wit is excellent, and as exhaustless
as it is keen. She says of Calaynos--

He looks on pleasure as a kind of sin,
Calls pastime waste-time----

* * * * *

I heard a man, who spent a mortal life
In hoarding up all kinds of stones and ores,
Call one, who spitted flies upon a pin,
A fool to pass his precious lifetime thus.

She says of Oliver, Calayno's secretary,

Yes, there he goes--
Backward and forward, like a weaver's shuttle,
Spinning some web of wisdom most divine.

She addresses him thus--

Our clay, the preachers say, was warm