the main situation, and
written everything out of his own head except a few of the letters of
Tolla. Some of these added things are good, though one of the author's
besetting sins may be illustrated by the fact that he gives nearly half
a score pages to a retrospective review of the history of a Russian
General's widow and her daughter, when as many lines--or, better still,
a line or two of explanation here and there--would be all that the story
requires.[421] But the "given" situation itself is a difficult one to
handle interestingly: and, in some estimates at any rate, the difficulty
has not been overcome here. The son--a younger, but still amply endowed
son--of one of the greatest Roman families, compact of Princes and
Cardinals, with reminiscences of Venetian dogedom, falls in love, after
a half-hearted fashion, with the daughter of another house of somewhat
less, but still old repute, and of fair, though much lesser wealth. By a
good deal of "shepherding" on the part of her family and friends, and
(one is bound to say) some rather "downright Dunstable" on her own, he
is made to propose; but _her_ family accepts the demand that the thing
shall, for a time, be kept secret from _his_. Of course no such secrecy
is long possible; and his people, especially a certain wicked
cavaliere-colonel, with the aid of a French Monseigneur and the Russians
above mentioned, plot to break the thing off, and finally succeed.
"Lello" (Manuel) Coromila finds out the plot too late. Tolla dies of a
broken heart.

It seems to me--speaking with the humility which I do not merely affect,
but really feel on the particular point--that this might make a good
subject for a play: that in the hands of Shakespeare or Shelley it might
make a very great one in two different kinds. But--now speaking with
very much less diffidence--I do not think it a promising one for a
novel; and, speaking with hardly any at all, I think that it has
certainly not made a good one here. Shut up into the narrow action of
the stage; divested of the intervals which make its improbabilities more
palpable; and with the presentation of Lello as a weaker and baser
Hamlet, of Tolla as a betrayed Juliet--with all this brought out and
made urgent by a clever actor and actress, the thing might be made very
effective. Dawdled over in a novel again of three hundred pages, it
loses appeal to the sympathy and constantly starts fresh difficulties
for the understanding.

That a very