ss of pitch, is one of those dramatic audacities wherein
none perhaps but a Shakespeare could safely indulge. Of her character
the most prolific hint that is given is what she says to the
disguised Duke, when he is urging her to fasten her ear on his
advisings touching the part of Mariana: "I have spirit to do any thing
that appears not foul in the truth of my spirit." That is, she cares
not what face her action may wear to the world, nor how much reproach
it may bring on her from others, if it will only leave her the
society, which she has never parted from, of a clean breast and a pure
conscience.

Called from the cloister, where she is on the point of taking the veil
of earthly renouncement, to plead for her brother's life, she comes
forth a saintly anchoress, clad in the austerest sweetness of
womanhood, to throw the light of her virgin soul upon the dark,
loathsome scenes and characters around her. With great strength of
intellect and depth of feeling she unites an equal power of
imagination, the whole being pervaded, quickened, and guided by a
still, intense religious enthusiasm. And because her virtue is
securely rooted and grounded in religion, therefore she never thinks
of it as her own, but only as a gift from the Being whom she adores,
and who is her only hope for the keeping of what she has. Which
suggests the fundamental point of contrast between her and Angelo,
whose virtue, if such it may be called, is nothing, nay, worse than
nothing, because it is a virtue of his own making, is without any
inspiration from the one Source of all true good, and so has no basis
but pride, which is itself a bubble. Accordingly her character appears
to me among the finest, in some respects the very finest, in
Shakespeare's matchless cabinet of female excellence.

The power and pathos with which she pleads for her brother are well
known. At first she is timid, distrustful of her powers, shrinking
with modest awe of the law's appointed organ; and she seems drawn
unawares into the heights of moral argument and the most
sweetly-breathing strains of Gospel wisdom. Much of what she says has
become domesticated wherever the English language is spoken, and would
long since have grown stale, if it were possible to crush the
freshness of immortal youth out of it. The dialogues between her and
Angelo are extremely subtile and suggestive on both sides, fraught
with meanings to reward the most searching ethical study, but which I
cann