Sweet Isabel, take my part,
Lend me your knees, and all my life to come
I'll lend you all my life to do you service.
Isabella remains silent, and Mariana reiterates her prayer.
MARIANA.
Sweet Isabel, do yet but kneel by me,
Hold up your hands, say nothing, I'll speak all!
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.