To tell the legend of Beatrice Cenci here, is hardly needed.

Her father, a monster of vice and cruelty, was bent upon breaking her spirit by imprisonment, torture, and nameless outrage.

At last her patience ended; and finding no redress in human justice, no champion of her helplessness in living man, she wrought his death.

For this she died upon the scaffold, together with her step-mother and her brothers, who had aided in the execution of the murder.

The interest of "The Cenci", and it is overwhelmingly great, centres in Beatrice and her father; from these two chief actors in the drama, all the other characters fall away into greater or less degrees of unsubstantiality.