Why all the souls that were, were forfeit once;
And He, that might the 'vantage best have took,
Found out the remedy. How would you be,
If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are? O, think on that,
And mercy then will breathe within your lips,
Like man new made!

The beautiful things which Isabella is made to utter, have, like the
sayings of Portia, become proverbial; but in spirit and character they
are as distinct as are the two women. In all that Portia says, we
confess the power of a rich poetical imagination, blended with a quick
practical spirit of observation, familiar with the surfaces of things;
while there is a profound yet simple morality, a depth of religious
feeling, a touch of melancholy, in Isabella's sentiments, and something
earnest and authoritative in the manner and expression, as though they
had grown up in her mind from long and deep meditation in the silence
and solitude of her convent cell:--

O it is excellent
To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.

Could great men thunder,
As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet:
For every pelting, petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder; nothing but thunder
Merciful Heaven!
Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak
Than the soft myrtle. O but man, proud man!
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,
As make the angels weep.

Great men may jest with saints, 'tis wit in them;
But in the less, foul profanation.
That in the captain's but a choleric word,
Which in the soldier is flat blasphemy.

Authority, although it err like others,
Hath yet a kind of medicine in itself
That skins the vice o' the top. Go to you, bosom;
Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know
That's like my brother's fault: if it confess
A natural guiltiness such as his is,
Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue
Against my brother's life.

Let me be ignorant, and in nothing good,
But graciously to know I am no better.

The sense of death is most in apprehension;
And the poor beetle that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great