In the _Judith_, Hebbel had essayed a Hebrew theme somewhat callowly, but his maturity produces a masterpiece. His fidelity to Josephus is remarkable, yet in his hands a bare narrative becomes the interaction of vivid forces. Woman he understood, and Mariamne has in her the woman’s strange blend of self-sacrificial devotion and guardianship of her soul. There is such truth of feeling, such regal sorrow, in this deep-hearted Maccabean, and such a war between pride and abasement resolved finally into a noble composure before the inevitable, that she must stand as one of the great women of tragedy. As for Herod, brave and resolute though he was, the erosive atmosphere of intrigue had made him so familiar with the sham attitude of diplomacy that an unsullied emotion baffled him. True insight would have made him responsive, for ignoble he was not. _Gyges_ is the tragedy of a personality blindly unveiled; this is the tragedy of a personality blindly veiled. The historic significance is finely brought out by the opposition of the statuesque Roman Titus against the shifting Hellenic decay. His noble gravity is the last confessional of Mariamne and his arms receive the swooning Herod. The future moulding influence of civilisation is shown in this steel-clad nature. The episode of the Three Kings may be regarded as unhappy. No doubt, as the spiritual counterpart of Titus, it was meant to show the irresistible oncoming of a new influence, as well as the futility of Herod against Fate. But Fate is sufficient if she works from the characters involved, unless, as in _Agnes Bernauer_, the general issue is indissolubly linked with the particular. The doom of Herod was cast without the final irony of Christianity, whereby the tragedy of man and wife is unnecessarily inter-related with the world-drama. As to the translation itself, the roll of Hebbel’s verse is so distinctive that its preservation seemed necessary. Therefore, wherever possible, his lengthy sentences have been given their full value. He has also a habit of ending his lines with less accentuated words, and carrying the stress to the beginning of the following line. This at first jars, but as it was a conscious art-principle, it has been kept. We have spoken above of his theory of dramatic verse. By this device he tries to compensate for his roughness of style by another roughness which has a lightening effect. Both in the roll of his blank verse and in his broken rhythms it keeps his characters to a conversational pitch, whereby he prevents an operatic effect. In reading such lines as these, from _The Eve of St. Agnes_-- “And there hide Him in a chamber of such privacy That he might view her beauties unespied,” one feels that by beginning the line with an unaccentuated word Keats throws emphasis on the rhyme. Hebbel employs the opposite device to prevent his heavy lines from crashing on the final word.