There are individual scenes of the best Spanish romance. One is that in which Suero Pelaez, the _barba_, the personification of austere Castilian honour and loyalty, reproaches his son with his disorderly life. Suero Pelaez is the typical _père noble_, the heavy father of the stage, comparable for rigid loftiness of sentiment to the Ruy Gomez of _Hernani_. Victor Hugo would have done the scene magnificently, and as Alarcon wrote it, it will stand comparison with the best of the French romantic plays. In another scene Teodora and Fernando are prisoners to the count, and she saves her lover by pretending to betray him. She asks to be allowed to kill him, and when supplied with a sword for that atrocious purpose, cuts his bonds and gives him the weapon--a _coup de théâtre_ repeated with more or less disguise many thousands of times, but unfailing in its effect. In a more thoroughly Spanish scene, Fernando forces the count to do justice to his sister, Doña Ana, by promising to marry her, and having so salved the honour of his family, kills him in fair fight. Doña Ana displays the philosophy rarely wanting in the second _dama_ at the end of a play. While Don Julian was alive, honour required her to insist on marriage; but now that he is dead, and she has been righted, she is quite prepared to marry Don Garceran, who has gallantly played his part as Patroclus, Achates, Horatio, Amyas Leigh’s Lieutenant Cary, or Jack Easy’s friend Gascoigne--in short, hero’s right-hand man. It is not _King Lear_, or even _Phèdre_, but it is very amusing reading, made of such stuff as romance is made of at all times. [SN: El Condenado por Desconfiado.]