But the principle which gave a peculiar colouring to every feature of Isabella’s mind was piety. Such was the decorum of her manners, that, though encompassed by false friends and open enemies, not the slightest reproach was breathed on her fair name in this corrupt and calumnious court. She gave a liberal portion of her time to private devotions, as well as to the public exercises of religion. She expended large sums in useful charities, especially in the erection of hospitals and churches, and the more doubtful endowments of monasteries. Her piety was strikingly exhibited in that unfeigned humility which is so rarely found; and most rarely in those whose great powers and exalted stations seem to raise them above the level of ordinary mortals. A remarkable illustration of this is afforded in the queen’s correspondence with Talavera, in which her meek and docile spirit is strikingly contrasted with the Puritanical intolerance of her confessor. Unfortunately, the royal conscience was at times committed to very different keeping; and that humility which made her defer so reverentially to her ghostly advisers led, under the fanatic Torquemada, the confessor of her early youth, to the establishment of the Inquisition and the exile of the Jews. But though blemishes of the deepest dye on her administration, they are certainly not to be regarded as such on her moral character. It will be difficult to condemn her, indeed, without condemning the age; for these very acts are not only excused, but extolled by her contemporaries, as constituting her strongest claims to renown and to the gratitude of her country. They proceeded from the principle, openly avowed by the court of Rome, that zeal for the purity of the faith could atone for every crime. This immoral maxim, flowing from the head of the church, was echoed in a thousand different forms by the subordinate clergy, and greedily received by a superstitious people. It was not to be expected that a solitary woman, filled with natural diffidence of her own capacity on such subjects, should array herself against those venerated counsellors whom she had been taught from her cradle to look to as the guides and guardians of her conscience.