The hermit's apparition warns Frederic to forget Matilda at the moment when his pursuit of her has begun to outweigh the supernatural warnings that had previously alarmed him. Appearing in Hippolita's oratory, the skeletal figure recalls Frederic's deliverance from bondage and the buried sabre engraved with Heaven's command, then gives him a blunt instruction: abandon his desire for Matilda. Frederic responds not with resolution but with a struggle between repentance and passion, making the encounter a sharp collision between dynastic desire and a sacred obligation he cannot simply dismiss.

Causes and Setting

After a banquet, Manfred accompanies Isabella to her apartment, while Matilda joins her mother, Hippolita, on the castle ramparts. Frederic, who has been struck by Matilda's beauty, leaves his chamber hoping to find Hippolita alone. He intends to encourage her acquiescence to a divorce: Manfred has made possession of Isabella a condition of granting Matilda to Frederic's wishes. In this immediate context, Frederic's interest in Matilda is bound up with a proposed marriage and the negotiations between their families.

Frederic believes Hippolita is in her oratory, though she has gone elsewhere. He enters the quiet apartment and proceeds to the oratory, where a person kneels before the altar. At first, he takes the long-robed figure for a religious man absorbed in prayer. The setting is thus not incidental: Frederic enters seeking Hippolita to pursue a worldly arrangement, only to encounter a figure who turns the sacred space into the scene of a warning against that pursuit.

The Apparition and Its Warning

When Frederic addresses the kneeling person as a reverend father and explains that he seeks Hippolita, the figure answers by asking whether he came to the castle in search of her. Turning toward him, it reveals a skeleton in a hermit's cowl. Frederic recoils and calls for the protection of angels; the apparition replies that he must first deserve their protection. Its rebuke makes the encounter more than a frightening interruption: the spectre presents Frederic as answerable for his choices.

The apparition then asks whether Frederic remembers it and directs him back to the wood of Joppa. Frederic recognizes the figure as the holy hermit and asks whether he can do anything for its eternal peace. Instead of requesting a service, the spectre confronts him with a prior obligation: he was delivered from bondage, and he must not forget the buried sabre or the heavenly command engraved upon it. Frederic insists that he has not forgotten, but asks what remains to be done. The apparition's answer is to forget Matilda. It vanishes immediately after issuing that instruction.

Frederic's Response and Aftermath

The vision leaves Frederic motionless for several minutes. He then falls before the altar and seeks the intercession of the saints, weeping as he asks for pardon. Yet the command does not extinguish his attachment: Matilda continues to occupy his thoughts, and he remains on the ground torn between penitence and passion. His response reveals the warning's force and its limit. Frederic recognizes a religious claim on his conduct, but the desire that brought him to Hippolita's apartment persists within the very act of repentance.

Hippolita enters alone with a taper and finds a man lying motionless on the floor. Alarmed, she cries out, believing him dead. Her fright brings Frederic back to himself. His face wet with tears, he tries to rush away, but Hippolita stops him and asks what has caused his distress and why he is there. Frederic begins to speak of his grief but does not disclose its cause in this moment. Hippolita, distressed by his silence, wonders whether the news concerns her child. The scene therefore closes on an unresolved warning: Frederic has been ordered to renounce Matilda, but the apparition's message has not yet been explained to Hippolita.

Narrative Significance

The encounter joins two competing claims on Frederic in one compact scene. His immediate purpose is to secure Hippolita's consent to divorce so that he can marry Matilda; the apparition recalls an earlier deliverance and a command he understands as coming from Heaven. Its intervention does not settle the marriage negotiations or show Frederic obeying. Instead, it makes the conflict explicit, then leaves him suspended between religious duty and attachment.

The scene also turns recognition into a form of judgment. Frederic identifies the figure as the hermit associated with the wood of Joppa, and the hermit identifies Frederic's present desire as a possible betrayal of the obligations attached to his deliverance. The apparition's final words are therefore both a command and a test: they expose the gap between Frederic's claim that he remembers the heavenly injunction and his continued pursuit of Matilda. His tears and prayer mark the weight of that contradiction, while his silence before Hippolita carries the crisis into the surrounding family drama.