In Werner's drama, _Attila_, a young man whom Attila loves is accused of perjury and confesses his guilt. Attila, who is an emotional, sentimental enthusiast, embraces him, shedding burning tears, and then orders him to be torn asunder by horses. Cruel sentimentality, fanatic brutality, is Romantic wont. Along with Attila we have Pope Leo, another character who seems to have escaped from the pages of Görres' _Mysticism_--this time undoubtedly from the chapter treating of the height from the ground to which the enthusiast in his religious rapture is at times raised; for, while he is praying, Leo "raises himself higher and higher, until he is resting only on the tips of his toes." He sympathises with Attila, and has a sort of magnetic influence over him. In _Martin Luther, oder die Weihe der Kraft_ ("The Consecration of Strength"), the mystery of religious consecration is the subject. The play opens significantly with a scene of the Novalis type, miners going down into and being drawn up from a mine. The representation of Luther is more suggestive of a Catholic saint than of the Protestant reformer. Of Katharina von Bora, too, a saintly character is made. Luther and she are accompanied throughout the play by guardian angels, Luther by the boy Theobald, who is really art in the shape of a seraph, and Katharina by a girl named Therese, who represents faith. A few years after Werner had thus sung the praises of the Reformation, he was converted; whereupon he wrote a poem, _Die Weihe der Unkraft_, full of such sentiments regarding his drama as: "Durch dies Gaukelblendwerk sprach ich der Wahrheit Hohn!" (With this delusive mummery I set at nought the truth.) The subject of his last tragedy, _Die Mutter der Makkabäer_, offered glorious opportunities for introducing all the tortures described in the legends of the martyrs; it abounds in physical suffering and religious ecstasies. The sons of Salome must either eat of the flesh of the sacrifice offered to Jupiter or die the most cruel death. The comical idea of its being a matter of life and death whether children taste certain food or not, is treated with the most overwhelming solemnity. In a state of supernatural excitement, Salome entreats her children, one by one, to allow themselves to be impaled, flayed, burned, &c. The sentimental chief torturer, Antiochus, admires Salome intensely; he actually falls upon his knees before her, crying-- "Du bist kein irdisch Weib!--Solch Opfer spendet Kein menschlich Wesen!--Segne mich, Du, vom Olymp gesendet!"[22]