With all her volubility, she is almost as little in place in the economy of the drama as in that of the camp; her "wild mass of rage" has the air of being a valued property which she manages and exhibits, not an impelling and consuming fire.

The more potent passion of Luria and his lieutenant Husain is more adequately rendered, though "the simple Moorish instinct" in them is made to accomplish startling feats in European subtlety.

The East with its gift of "feeling" comes once more, as in the _Druses_, into tragic contact with the North and its gift of "thought"; but it is to the feeling East and not to thinking North that we owe the clear analysis and exposition of the contrast.
Luria has indeed, like Djabal, assimilated just so much of European culture as makes its infusion fatal to him: he suffers the doom of the lesser race "Which when it apes the greater is forgone." But the noblest quality of the lesser race flashes forth at the close when he takes his life, not in defiance, nor in despair, but as a last act of passionate fidelity to Florence.

This is conceived with a refinement of moral imagination too subtle perhaps for appreciation on the stage; but of the tragic power and pathos of the conception there can be no question.

Mrs Browning, whose eager interest accompanied this drama through every stage of its progress, justly dwelt upon its "grandeur." The busy exuberance of Browning's thinking was not favourable to effects which multiplicity of detail tends to destroy; but the fate of this son of the "lone and silent East," though utterly un-Shakespearean in motive, recalls, more nearly than anything else in Browning's dramas, the heroic tragedy of Shakespeare.
[Footnote 22: Browning himself uses this parallel in almost his first reference to _Luria_ while still unwritten: _Letters of R.B.