ethan playwright has been chastened into
something more adapted to modern taste by Barry Cornwall; but, even with
his kindred power and skillful handling, the work of the early master
retained too rough a flavor for the public palate of our day, and very
reluctantly the project of bringing it out was abandoned.

The tragical story of Vittoria Corrombona, eminently tragical in that
age of dramatic lives and deaths, has furnished not only the subject of
this fine play of Ford's, but that of a magnificent historical novel, by
the great German writer, Tieck, in which it is difficult to say which
predominates, the intense interest of the heroine's individual career,
or that created by the splendid delineation of the whole state of Italy
at that period--the days of the grand old Sixtus the Fifth in Rome, and
of the contemporary Medici in Florence; it is altogether a masterpiece
by a great master. Superior in tragic horror, because unrelieved by the
general picture of contemporaneous events, but quite inferior as a work
of imagination, is the comparatively short sketch of Vittoria
Corrombona's life and death contained in a collection of Italian stories
called "Crimes Celebres," by Stendal, where it keeps company with other
tragedies of private life, which during the same century occupied with
their atrocious details the tribunals of justice in Rome. Among the
collection is the story from which Mr. Fechter's melodrama of "Bel
Demonio" was taken, the story of the Cenci, and the story of a certain
Duchess of Pagliano, all of them inconceivably horrible and revolting.

About the same time that this play of Barry Cornwall's was given up, a
long negotiation between Miss Mitford and the management of Covent
Garden came to a conclusion by her withdrawal of her play of "Inez de
Castro," a tragedy founded upon one of the most romantic and picturesque
incidents in the Spanish chronicle. After much uncertainty and many
difficulties, the project of bringing it out was abandoned. I remember
thinking I could do nothing with the part of the heroine, whose corpse
is produced in the last act, seated on the throne and receiving the
homage of the subjects of her husband, Pedro the Cruel--a very ghastly
incident in the story, which I think would in itself have endangered the
success of the play. My despondency about the part of Inez had nothing
to do with the possible effect of this situation, however, but was my
invariable impression with regard