baseness of their denial and desertion
been already in the heart consummated.

We need not follow him through all his subsequent and deepening treasons.
They all, without exception, want every element that might make even
treason impressive. They want even such factitious elevation as their
being prompted by hatred or revenge might lend;--even such broader
interest as their being done in the interest of a party, or for some wide
end, could confer. They have no fuller or deeper import than the present
ease, present safety, present or future advantage, of that object which
fills up his universe,--Self. He would rather not have betrayed the
trust reposed in him by Romola's father, if the end he thereby proposed
to himself could have been attained otherwise than through such betrayal.
His plot with Dolfo Spini for placing the great Monk-prophet in the hands
of his enemies, has no darker motive than the getting out of the way an
indirect obstacle to his own advancement, and a man whose labours tend to
make life harder and more serious for all who come under his influence.
Bernardo del Nero, with his stainless honour, has from the first taken up
an attitude of tacit revulsion toward him; but there is no revenge
prompting the part he plays towards the noble, true-hearted old man. He
would rather that he and his fellow-victims were saved, if his own safety
and ultimate gain could be secured otherwise than through their betrayal
and death. There is no hardness or cruelty in him, save when its
transient displays toward Romola are necessary for furthering some
present end: he never indulges in the luxury of unnecessary and
unprofitable sins. The sharp, steadfast, unwavering consistency of Tito
is even more marked than that of Romola, for twice Romola falters, and
turns to flee. The supple, flexible Greek follows out the law he has
laid down as the law of his life,--worships the god he has set up as the
god of his worship with an inexorable constancy that never for one chance
moment falters. That god is self; that law is, in one word,
self-pleasing. Long before the end comes, we feel that Tito Melema is a
lost soul; that for him and in him there is no place for repentance; that
to him we may without any uncharity apply the most fearful words human
language has ever embodied;--he has sinned the "sin which _cannot_ be
forgiven, neither in this world, neither in the world to come."

"Justice," says the author, as the dead Tit