In _Casa Braccio_ a fine motive, that of the peasant of Subiaco's long-cherished vengeance, with its final satisfaction, both based on a mistake, is wasted, because no one can care in the least for the man who is slain, and the original sin committed by this victim (marriage with a nun), although it seems so great to Mr Crawford, appears to us no sin at all; so that his tragic end neither moves us nor satisfies in us any sense of justice. What are admirably rendered and true to life in _Casa Braccio_ are not Griggs and Gloria, or Angus Dalrymple and Maria Addorata, but the peasants of Subiaco, Stefanone, with his long-cherished vendetta, and his wife, Sora Nanna, who wears her lost daughter's shoes because it would have been a sin to waste them. One regrets that two persons so perfectly natural and well drawn should be set on a pyre of flaring melodrama which obscures their portraits in its smoke and flame. Why could he not give us a story of Subiaco, passionate but natural, in which the action would have passed entirely in that interesting and little-known part of the Sabine mountains? When I use the term melodrama, I mean by it that which mimics the tragic, but falls short of it; the tragic, imitated but so environed, that it loses dignity and has something of the inflated and grotesque. The melodrama in _Pietro Ghisleri_, in _Taquisara_, and in _The Children of the King_ is this kind of melodrama; it does not move us for a moment; we are, on the contrary, impatient of it in a modern period and history, with neither of which it has any harmony. In the latter story the conception of Rughero, though by no means new, is fine; but the frame in which this mariner is set lacks all fitness for such a figure; and the man whom he murders is not sinner enough, nor serious enough in his actions, for the reader to be moved to pardon the act as the author himself pardons it. If violent delights have violent endings, violent endings need strong provocation and clear explanation; they should appear to the reader to be inevitable, the offspring of an unavoidable result. To the reader such a crime as this should appear to be the inexorable justice of an inevitable retribution. But in the violent _dénouement_ of _The Children of the King_ the cause is trivial, the act under the circumstances improbable, and the rude shock of it is not in accordance with any of the other characters and with the light, careless modernity of the setting of this story.