Meantime, the unhappy Melibœa, urged by whatever insinuation and seduction can suggest, is made to confess her love for Calisto. From this moment, her fate is sealed. Calisto visits her secretly in the night, after the fashion of the old Spanish gallants; and then the conspiracy hurries onward to its consummation. At the same time, however, the retribution begins. The persons who had assisted Calisto to bring about his first interview with her quarrel for the reward he had given them; and Celestina, at the moment of her triumph, is murdered by her own base agents and associates, two of whom, attempting to escape, are in their turn summarily put to death by the officers of justice. Great confusion ensues. Calisto is regarded as the indirect cause of Celestina’s death, since she perished in his service; and some of those who had been dependent upon her are roused to such indignation, that they track him to the place of his assignation, seeking for revenge. There they fall into a quarrel with the servants he had posted in the streets for his protection. He hastens to the rescue, is precipitated from a ladder, and is killed on the spot. Melibœa confesses her guilt and shame, and throws herself headlong from a high tower; immediately upon which the whole melancholy and atrocious story ends with the lament of the broken-hearted father over her dead body. As has been intimated, the Celestina is rather a dramatized romance than a proper drama, or even a well-considered attempt to produce a strictly dramatic effect. Such as it is, however, Europe can show nothing on its theatres, at the same period, of equal literary merit. It is full of life and movement throughout. Its characters, from Celestina down to her insolent and lying valets, and her brutal female associates, are developed with a skill and truth rarely found in the best periods of the Spanish drama. Its style is easy and pure, sometimes brilliant, and always full of the idiomatic resources of the old and true Castilian; such a style, unquestionably, as had not yet been approached in Spanish prose, and was not often reached afterwards. Occasionally, indeed, we are offended by an idle and cold display of learning; but, like the gross manners of the piece, this poor vanity is a fault that belonged to the age.