to Melema through baseness on baseness, and
treason after treason, to the lowest deep of perdition.

Throughout the first wonderful love-scene with Fedalma, the vital
difference, the essential antagonism between these two natures, is
revealed to us through a hundred subtle and delicate touches, and we are
made to feel that there is a depth in hers beyond the power of his to
reach. Chivalrous, absorbing, tyrannising over his whole being, even
pure as his love is, it far fails of the deeper and holier purity of
hers. It shudders at the possibility of even outward soil upon her
loveliness; but it does so primarily because such soil would react upon
his self-love:--

"Have _I_ not made your place and dignity
The very height of my ambition?"

Her nobler nature recoils with chill foreboding terror from his first
breach of trust, _because_ it is a fall from his truest and highest
right. His answer to her question already quoted, reveals a love which
the world's judgment may rank as the best and noblest, but reveals a
principle which, applied to aught beneath the only and supremest good,
makes love only a more insidious and deeply corrupting form of
self-pleasing: "'Tis what I love determines how I love." Love is his
"highest allegiance"; and it becomes ere long an allegiance before which
truth, faith, and honour give way, and guidance and control of conscience
are swept before the fierce storm of self-willed passion that brooks no
interposition between itself and its aim.

We are not attempting a formal review of this work; and as we have passed
without notice the powerful embodiment in Father Isidor of whatever was
true and earnest in the Inquisition, we must also pass very slightly over
the interview with a still more remarkable creation--the Hebrew physician
and astrologer Sephardo--except as we have in this interview further
illustration of the character of Don Silva, and of the direction in which
the self-love of passion is impelling him. We see conscience seeking
from Sephardo--and seeking in vain--confirmation of the purpose already
determined in his own heart; striving toward self-justification by every
sophistry the passion-blinded intellect can suggest; struggling to
transfer to another the wrong, if not the shame, of his own contemplated
breach of trust; endeavouring to take refuge in stellar and fatalistic
agencies from his own "nature quiveringly poised" between good and evil;
and at last, merging a