Chapter ISABELLA to Isolt of I by Brewer's Readers Handbook

a view of escaping from the house, and is caught by a colonel Briton, an English officer, who conducts her to the house of her friend donna Violantê. Here the colonel calls upon her, and don Felix, supposing Violantê to be the object of his visits, becomes furiously jealous. After a considerable embroglio, the mystery is cleared up, and a double marriage takes place.—Mrs. Centlivre: The Wonder (1714). Middle-sized, a lovely brown, a fine pouting lip, eyes that roll and languish, and seem to speak the exquisite pleasure she could give.—Act v. sc. I.

Isabella (The countess), wife of Roberto. After a long series of crimes of infidelity to her husband, and of murder, she is brought to execution.—Morton: The Wonder of Women, or Sophonisba (1605).

Isabella (The lady), a beautiful young girl, who accompanied her father on a chase. Her step-mother requested her to return, and tell the cook to prepare the milk-white doe for dinner. Lady Isabella did as she was told, and the cook replied, “Thou art the doe that I must dress.” The scullion-boy exclaimed, “Oh, save the lady’s life, and make thy pies of me!” But the cook heeded him not. When the lord returned and asked for his daughter, the scullion-boy made answer, “If my lord would see his daughter, let him cut the pasty before him.” The father, horrified at the whole affair, adjudged the step-mother to be burnt alive, and the cook to stand in boiling lead, but the scullion-boy he made his heir.—Percy: Reliques, iii. 2.

Isabella or The Pot of Basil, a story from Boccaccio turned into verse by Keats (1820).

Isabelle, sister of Léonor, an orphan; brought up by Sganarelle according to his own notions of training a girl to make him a good wife. She was to dress in serge, to keep to the house, to occupy herself in domestic affairs, to sew, knit, and look after the linen, to hear no flattery, attend no places of public amusement, never to be left to her own devices, but to run in harness like a mill-horse. The result was that she duped Sganarelle and married Valère. (See Leonor.)—Molière: L’école des Maris (1661).

Isabinda, daughter of sir Jealous Traffick a merchant. Her father is resolved she shall marry don Diego Barbinetto, but she is in love with Charles Gripe; and Charles, in the dress of a Spaniard, passing himself off as the Spanish don, marries her.—Mrs. Centlivre: The Busy Body (1709).

Isenbras (Sir), a hero of mediæval romance. Sir Isenbras was at first proud and presumptuous, but adversity made him humble and penitent. In this stage he carried two children of a poor woodcutter across a ford on his horse.

Millais has taken sir Isenbras carrying the children across the ferry, as the subject of one of his pictures.

I warne you first at the begynninge
That I will make no vain carpinge [prate] …
Of Octoriane and Isembrase.
   —William of Nassington.

Isengrin (Sir) or Sir Isengrim, the wolf, afterwards created earl of Pitwood, wood, in the beast-epic of Reynard the Fox. Sir Isengrin typifies the barons, and Reynard the Church. The gist of the tale is to show how Reynard overreaches his uncle Wolf (1498).

Iseult of Brittany, the lady-love of Tristram. Tennyson tells the tale in The Last Tournament (Idylls of the King).

(Matthew Arnold wrote Tristram and Iseult. See Ysolde.)

Ishah, the name of Eve before the Fall; so called because she was taken out of ish, i.e. “man” (Gen. ii. 23); but after the expulsion from paradise Adam called his wife Eve or Havah, i.e. “the mother of all living” (Gen. iii. 20).