In the plays there are lyrics, too, delicately stressing their character of poetic drama, and giving full compass to the author's powers in each work. Indeed, the combination of lyric and dramatic elements is very skilfully and effectively managed. There is a ballad which serves in each case to state the _motif_ at the opening of the play: not in so many words, of course, but suggested in the tragical events of some old story. And snatches of the ballad recur throughout, crooned by one of the persons of the drama, or played by a lutist at a gay court festival. But always the dramatic scheme is subserved by the lyrical fragments. Sometimes it will fill a short interval with a note of foreboding, or make a running accompaniment to the action, or induce an ironic tone, or, by interpreting emotion, it will relieve tension which had grown almost too acute. But, fittingly, when the crisis approaches and action must move freely to the end, the lyric element disappears. "The Ballad of the Mother," which precedes "Wild Justice," creates the atmosphere in which the play moves from beginning to end. It prefigures the plot, too, in its story of the dead mother who hears her children weeping from her grave in the churchyard; and, after vainly imploring both angel and sexton to let her go and comfort them, makes a compact with the devil to release her. "Then help me out, devil, O help me, good devil!" "A price must be paid to a spirit of evil. Will you pay me the price?" said the spirit from Hell. "The price shall be paid, the bargain is made." ..... Boom! boom! boom! From the tower in the silence there sounds the great bell. "I am fixing the price," said the devil from Hell. The mother in the play is Mrs Gwyllim, wife of a vicious tyrant. For twenty-one years she had borne cruelty and humiliation at his hands. She had even been patient under the wrongs which he had inflicted on her children: the violence which had maimed her eldest son, Owain, in his infancy; which had hounded another boy away to sea and had driven a daughter into a madhouse. But at the opening of the play a sterner spirit is growing in her: meekness and submission are beginning to break down under the consciousness of a larger duty to her children. We find that she has been making appeals for help, first to their only accessible relation; and that failing, to the Vicar of their parish. But neither of these men had dared to move against the tyrant. They live on a lonely little island off the coast of Wales, where Gwyllim practically has the small population in his power. He had built a lighthouse on the coast; and at the time of the action, which is early in the nineteenth century, he is empowered to own it and to take toll from passing vessels. Thus he controls the means of existence of the working people; and the rest are deterred, by reasons of policy or family interest, from putting any check upon him.