Shelley's "Cenci" in a different way mirrors this eternal defeat that human struggle after justice must encounter. Deeply impressed by the current tradition about Beatrice Cenci, he made this story of incest and parricide the expression of his view of life and history as a conflict between tyranny and downtrodden innocence. Nowhere else in Shelley, not even in "Prometheus Unbound," does this world drama come out of the clouds and reveal itself with such clarity and power. There is passion in the persons, climax in the situations, and directness in the language such as the romantic drama had rarely shown. The philosophical conception and the tangle of human motives do not indeed quite harmonize. Beatrice's lie and her unworthy seeking after life are bits of the story which interfere with our acceptance of Beatrice the martyr, flaws that Browning would not have admitted. On the other hand, Shelley's philosophy overrides the story, as may be seen by a comparison of the tragedy with one of the earliest to show dawning romanticism. Walpole's "Mysterious Mother," which at this time Byron was praising as "the last tragedy," treats a more horrible story of incest with the interest mainly in the plot, holding in suspense the fearful solution until the end; "The Cenci" begins with the act of incest, and then tries to carry our interest solely to the two characters, one the embodiment of all inherited evil, the other, a pure and beautiful spirit striving madly and in vain to free herself from wrong that is might. The conquest of the stage, the writing of dramatic blank verse, and the endowment of this story of crime with representational truth were tasks too large to be accomplished in a single play; but, though faulty in the details of dramatic art, "The Cenci" is, for a first tragedy, without an equal in its mastery of the great essentials of tragic poetry. The poet who shrank from comedy as from a wicked thing and who thought a story of incest possible in a London theatre, had much to learn before he could master the stage. But "The Cenci" reveals the maturing Shelley, who was opening his mind to new impressions, admiring "Cain" and "Don Juan," profiting from Æschylus and Calderon as well as Shakespeare, and who was seeing his allegories clothed in human form, and no longer only in images of mist and flame. As one reads one wonders,--had the play not been the last as well as his first tragedy? had it come at the beginning instead of nearly at the close of the romantic movement? In "Prometheus Unbound" there is even greater achievement in the presentation of this world conflict; and there Cain triumphs and Beatrice is purified. But the achievement is lyrical rather than dramatic, and has no proper place in the history of tragedy.