O Isabel! will you not lend a knee?

Isabella, thus urged, breaks silence and appeals to the Duke, not with
supplication, or persuasion, but with grave argument, and a kind of
dignified humility and conscious power, which are finely characteristic
of the individual woman.

Most bounteous Sir,
Look, if it please you, on this man condemn'd,
As if my brother liv'd; I partly think
A due sincerity govern'd his deeds
Till he did look on me; since it is so
Let him not die. My brother had but justice,
In that he did the thing for which he died.
For Angelo,
His art did not o'ertake his bad intent,
That perish'd by the way: thoughts are no subjects.
Intents, but merely thoughts.

In this instance, as in the one before mentioned, Isabella's
conscientiousness is overcome by the only sentiment which ought to
temper justice into mercy, the power of affection and sympathy.

Isabella's confession of the general frailty of her sex, has a peculiar
softness, beauty, and propriety. She admits the imputation with all the
sympathy of woman for woman; yet with all the dignity of one who felt
her own superiority to the weakness she acknowledges.

ANGELO.

Nay, women are frail too.

ISABELLA.

Ay, as the glasses where they view themselves;
Which are as easy broke as they make forms.
Women! help heaven! men their creation mar
In profiting by them. Nay, call us ten times frail,
For we are soft as our complexions are,
And credulous to false prints.

Nor should we fail to remark the deeper interest which is thrown round
Isabella, by one part of her character, which is betrayed rather than
exhibited in the progress of the action; and for which we are not at
first prepared, though it is so perfectly natural. It is the strong
under-current of passion and enthusiasm flowing beneath this calm and
saintly self-possession; it is the capacity for high feeling and
generous and strong indignation, veiled beneath the sweet austere
composure of the religious recluse, which, by the very force of
contrast, powerfully impress the imagination. As we see in real life
that where, from some external or habitual cause, a strong control is
exercised over naturally quick feelings and an impetuous temper, they
display themselves with a proportionate vehemence when that restraint is
removed; so the very violence with