path, the mists clear away from around Savonarola too, and she sees him
again at last as he really was, in the essential truthfulness, nobleness,
and self-devotedness of his life.

Of the after-life little is told us, but little needed to be told. We
have followed Romola thus far with dulled intelligence of mind and soul
if we cannot picture it clearly and certainly for ourselves. Love that
never falters, patience that never questions, meekness that never fails,
truth clear and still as the light of heaven, devotedness that knows no
thought of self, a life flowing calmly on through whatever of sorrow and
disappointment may remain toward the perfect purity and blessedness of
heaven. Few, we think, can carefully study the character and development
of Romola del Bardo and refuse to endorse the verdict that Imagination
has given us no figure more rounded and complete in every grace and glory
of feminine loveliness.

The sensational fiction of the day has laboured hard in the production of
great criminals; but it has produced no human being so vitally debased,
no nature so utterly loathsome, no soul so hopelessly lost, as the
handsome, smiling, accomplished, popular, viceless Greek, Tito Melema.
Yet is he the very reverse of what is called a monster of iniquity. That
which gives its deep and awful power to the picture is its simple,
unstrained, unvarnished truthfulness. He knows little of himself who
does not recognise as existent within himself, and as always battling for
supremacy there, that principle of evil which, accepted by Tito as his
life-law, and therefore consummating itself in him, "bringeth forth
death;" death the most utter and, so far as it is possible to see, the
most hopeless that can engulf the human soul.

The conception of Tito as one great central figure in a work of art would