singular creatures, and their unaccountableness is not of the right
feminine kind that offers an attractive role to a good actress. Why
should the Countess Fiesco, herself an aristocrat and a woman with
heroic blood in her veins, submit so meekly in her own house to the
coarse effrontery of the woman who has wronged her? We get the
impression that she is only a crushed flower,--a helpless, wan-cheeked
thing, with nothing womanly about her except her jealousy. And then, at
the end, she suddenly develops into a heroine. And what a strange
heroine! No one will chide her for resorting on the fatal night to the
protection of male attire,--a good enough Shaksperian device,--but how
remarkable that a woman wandering crazily in the dark, and already
sufficiently disguised, should borrow a tell-tale cloak and a worse than
useless sword from a corpse that she happens to stumble upon! No wonder
that Schiller in revising for the stage decided to let Leonora live
rather than provide for her death by such a stagy _tour de force_. In
the stage version, however, she does not reappear after the parting
scene, and so we are left to wonder why she was introduced at all.

In Madame Julia we have a type of woman who was meant to be repulsive,
and so far forth the young artist must be admitted to have wrought
successfully. She is somewhat minutely described as a 'tall and plump
widow of twenty-five; a proud coquette, her beauty spoiled by its
oddity; dazzling and not pleasing, and with a wicked, cynical
expression.' That such a woman should befool Fiesco and rejoice in her
triumph is quite thinkable, but her qualities are those which usually go
with a certain amount of discretion. That she should suddenly lose her
head and throw herself away in a voluptuous frenzy hardly comports with
the type. Nor is there anything in the inventory of her qualities that
prepares us for her sudden assumption of the role of poisoner, when she
is already, as she must suppose, the mistress of the situation. In her