Prescott's own statements, cover them as he will never so artfully, whose practical wisdom, he assures us, was "founded on the purest and most exalted principle," and whose "honest soul abhorred anything like artifice." Isabella was unquestionably a woman of good intentions; but with such substance the soul-burner's pit is paved. Prescott throws all the odium of the Inquisition on Torquemada, and I concur. The monk's mind was the ashy, unmelting mould in which the woman's more plastic affections were cast. But then he should be accredited with some portion of the virtues that adorned the character of Isabella, for he was the author of many of them. To be just, if Isabella is accredited with her virtues, she must be charged with her crimes. And if the queen may throw from her shoulders upon those of her advisers the responsibility of iniquity permitted under her rule, why not King Ferdinand, who likewise had men about him urging him to this policy and to that? True, we excuse much in woman as the weaker, and very justly so, which we condemn in the man of powerful cunning. But Isabella was not exactly clay in the hands of those about her; or if so, then praise her for her imbecility, and not for any virtue. But she could muster will and spirit enough of her own upon occasion—witness her threat to kill Pedro Giron with her own hand rather than marry him, and the policy which speaks plainly her sagacity and state-craft in the selection of Ferdinand, and in the strict terms of her marriage contract which excluded her husband from any sovereign rights in Castile or Leon. Most inconsistently, indeed, in reviewing the administration of Isabella, at the end of three volumes of unadulterated adulation Prescott gives his heroine firmness enough in all her ways; independence of thought and action sufficient to circumscribe the pretensions of her nobles; and she "was equally vigilant in resisting ecclesiastical encroachment;" "she enforced the execution of her own plans, oftentimes even at great personal hazard, with a resolution surpassing that of her husband." When, however, she signed the edict for the expulsion of the Jews, the excuse was that "she had been early schooled to distrust her own reason." But why multiply quotations? The _Ferdinand and Isabella_ of Prescott is full of these flat contradictions.