e styles him "The Fantastical Duke of Dark Corners." But
Isabella is ever consistent in her pure and upright simplicity, and in
the midst of this simulation, expresses a characteristic disapprobation
of the part she is made to play,

To speak so indirectly I am loth:
I would say the truth.[13]

She yields to the supposed Friar with a kind of forced docility, because
her situation as a religious novice, and his station, habit, and
authority, as her spiritual director, demand this sacrifice. In the end
we are made to feel that her transition from the convent to the throne
has but placed this noble creature in her natural sphere: for though
Isabella, as Duchess of Vienna, could not more command our highest
reverence than Isabella, the novice of Saint Clare, yet a wider range of
usefulness and benevolence, of trial and action, was better suited to
the large capacity, the ardent affections, the energetic intellect, and
firm principle of such a woman as Isabella, than the walls of a
cloister. The philosophical Duke observes in the very first scene--

Spirits are not finely touched,
But to fine issues: nor nature never lends
The smallest scruple of her excellence,
But like a thrifty goddess she determines,
Herself the glory of a creditor,
Both thanks and use.[14]

This profound and beautiful sentiment is illustrated in the character
and destiny of Isabella. She says, of herself, that "she has spirit to
act whatever her heart approves;" and what her heart approves we know.

In the convent, (which may stand here poetically for any narrow and
obscure situation in which such a woman might be placed,) Isabella would
not have been unhappy, but happiness would have been the result of an
effort, or of the concentration of her great mental powers to some
particular purpose; as St. Theresa's intellect, enthusiasm, tenderness,
restless activity, and burning eloquence, governed by one overpowering
sentiment of devotion, rendered her the most extraordinary of saints.
Isabella, like St. Theresa, complains that the rules of her order are
not sufficiently severe, and from the same cause,--that from the
consciousness of strong intellectual and imaginative power, and of
overflowing sensibility, she desires a more "strict restraint," or, from
the continual, involuntary struggle against the trammels imposed, feels
its necessity.

ISABELLA.

And have you nuns no further