made up her mind to be chaste." "She has a dreadfully rectangular nature, is an accomplished and not very scrupulous dialectician, and thinks it proper to be benevolent only when she has the law on her side." "She is utterly without impulse." "No wonder," Mr. White in his contemptuous bitterness can say, "that Lucio tells her,
if you should need a pin,
You could not with more tame a tongue desire it.
But it is very questionable whether Isabella was womanish enough to need a pin, she probably used buttons,—or would have done so had she lived now-a-days. It may be uncharitable, perhaps, to accuse her of having an eye to the reversion of the points with which Claudio tied his doublet and hose; but her indifference to his death looks very like it." A sorry jest, but in keeping with the sorry argument of Shakspeare's Scholar. But again: she is a "sheriff in petticoats," of an "impassibility absolutely frightful" and "cold blooded barbarity." Her spirit is "utterly uncompassionate," "pitiless," "inhuman, not to say unwomanly," in her interview with her doomed brother, and the language she uses repulsively "obdurate" and "savage." She is Shakspeare's ideal of the "unfeminine, repulsive, monstrous," in woman—of the too much brain and too little heart. "Its unloveliness was not to deter him from the task. … He drew an Iago and an Angelo among men; among women, why should he withhold his hand from a Lady Macbeth and an Isabella?" As for her marriage with the irresolute laissez-faire-loving, eaves-dropping Duke, which Mr. Hallam calls "one of Shakspeare's hasty half thoughts," Mr. White's only scruple, if any, is, that the poor Duke had too bad a bargain. "She, after having listened to his arguments, probably found him guilty—not of love, that would have been unpardonable—but of preference for a female, under extenuating circumstances, and—married him. He needed a 'grey mare;' and Shakespeare, with his unerring perception of the eternal fitness of things, gave him Isabella." Such is Mr. White's interpretation of a character which we regard as Shakspeare's embodiment of noblest womanhood, in its religious phase—a creature so pure and intense in her heavenward aspirations, that she cannot conceive the possibility of utter baseness and renegade treason against Heaven, in one so near to her as her brother; devoutly fixed as her own eye is on things unseen and eternal, not on things seen and temporal; immovably fixed as her affections are on things above, not on things on the earth: for she walks by faith, and not by sight; and because she loves her brother dearly, she would have him die at once , in penitence and hope, that, the once-for-all death past, the judgment after death may not leave him reprobate; because she loves him, she is jealous of his honour, and her own involved in his,—and she could weep tears of joy to see him bow meekly to the impending fate, as the guaranty of his reconcilement with God, and of her union with him in spirit by ties the sweetest and most hallowed, though impalpable henceforth to gross and grovelling sense,—rather, oh how much rather than tears of shame, such as must scald the saintly maiden's cheeks, to say nothing of the wasting and corroding thoughts that lie too deep for tears, if her father's son make election of the life that now is, instead of the life which is to come. The shock she experiences as the humiliating truth dawns on her, is expressed in a
