play, in the modern sense, and it depended altogether for its success
upon the two characters of Macias and Elvira.

In devising the character of Macias the Italian author had made use of a
traditional Spanish type, which has its historical sources, and has
inspired many a Spanish poet from the fifteenth century downwards. Macias
is knight, poet, and lover; his love is a kind of southern madness which
withers every other feeling in its neighbourhood, and his tragic death is
the only natural ending to a career so fierce and uncontrolled. Elvira,
with whom Macias is in love, the daughter of Nuno Fernandez, is embodied
gentleness and virtue, until the fierce progress of her fate has taught
her that men are treacherous and the world cruel. For her love had been
prosperous and smooth until, by a series of events, it had been brought
into antagonism with two opposing interests--those of her father and of a
certain Fernan Perez, the tool and favourite of the powerful Duke of
Villena. The ambition and selfish passion of these two men are enlisted
against her. Perez is determined to marry her; her father is determined
to sweep Macias out of the path of his own political advancement. The
intrigue devised between the two is perfectly successful. Macias is
enticed away; Elvira, forced to believe that she is deserted and
betrayed, is half driven, half entrapped, into a marriage with Perez; and
Macias, returning to claim her against a hundred obstacles, meets the
wedding party on their way back to the palace of the Duke. The rest of
the play represented, of course, the struggle between the contending
forces thus developed. In plan and mechanism the story was one of a
common romantic type, neither better nor worse than hundreds of others of
which the literary archives of the first half of the present century are
full. It required all the aid that fine literary treatment could give it
to raise it above the level of vulgar melodrama and turn it into tragedy.
But fortune had been kind to it; the subject had been already handled in
the Italian sketch with delicacy and a true tragic insight, and Edward
Wallace had brought all the resources of a very evenly-trained and
critical mind to bear upon his task. It could hardly have been foreseen
that he would be attracted by the subject, but once at work upon it he
had worked with enthusiasm.

The curtain drew up on the great hall of the Villena Palace. Everything
that antiquarian knowledge coul