We have said that Webster's peculiarity is the tenacity of his hold on the mental and moral constitution of his characters. We know of their appetites and passions only by their effects on their souls. He has properly no sensuousness. Thus in "The White Devil," his other great tragedy, the events proceed from the passion of Brachiano for Vittoria Corombona,--a passion so intense as to lead one to order the murder of his wife, and the other the murder of her husband. If either Fletcher or Ford had attempted the subject, the sensual and emotional motives to the crime would have been represented with overpowering force, and expressed in the most alluring images, so that wickedness would have been almost resolved into weakness; but Webster lifts the wickedness at once from the senses into the region of the soul, exhibits its results in spiritual depravity, and shows the Satanic energy of purpose which may spring from the ruins of the moral will. There is nothing lovable in Vittoria. She seems, indeed, almost without sensations; and the affection between her and Brachiano is simply the magnetic attraction which one evil spirit has for another evil spirit. Francisco, the brother of Brachiano's wife, says to him: "Thou hast a wife, our sister; would I had given Both her white hands to death, bound and locked fast In her last winding-sheet, when I gave thee But one." This is the language of the intensest passion, but as applied to the adulterous lover of Vittoria it seems little more than the utterance of reasonable regret; for devil can only truly mate with devil, and Vittoria is Brachiano's real "affinity." The moral confusion they produce by their deeds is traced with more than Webster's usual steadiness of nerve and clearness of vision. The evil they inflict is a cause of evil in others; the passion which leads to murder rouses the fiercer passion which aches for vengeance; and at last, when the avengers of crime have become morally as bad as the criminals, they are all involved in a common destruction. Vittoria is probably Webster's most powerful delineation. Bold, bad, proud, glittering in her baleful beauty, strong in that evil courage which shrinks from crime as little as from danger, she meets her murderers with the same self-reliant scorn with which she met her judges. "Kill her attendant first," exclaimed one of them. "_Vittoria._ You shall not kill her first; behold my breast: I will be waited on in death; my servant Shall never go before me. "_Gasparo._ Are you so brave! "_Vittoria._ Yes, I shall welcome death, As princes do some great ambassadors; I'll meet thy weapon half-way. "_Lodovico._ Strike, strike, With a joint motion. "_Vittoria._ 'T was a manly blow; The next thou giv'st, murder some sucking infant, And then thou wilt be famous."