Antony, and Lepidus, met on a small island near Bononia, and there made up their bloody proscription. The overthrow of Brutus and Cassius near Philippi took place in the Fall of the next year. So that the events of the drama cover a period of something over two years and a half.

It has been justly observed that Shakespeare shows much judgment in the naming of his plays. From this observation, however, several critics, as Gildon and Schlegel, have excepted the play in hand, pronouncing the title a misnomer, on the ground that Brutus, and not Cæsar, is the hero of it. It is indeed true that Brutus is the hero; nevertheless I must insist upon it that the play is rightly named, inasmuch as Cæsar is not only the subject but also the governing power of it throughout. He is the centre and springhead of the entire action, giving law and shape to every thing that is said and done. This is manifestly true in what occurs before his death; and it is true in a still deeper sense afterwards, since his genius then becomes the Nemesis or retributive Providence, presiding over the whole course of the drama.

The characterization of this drama in some of the parts is, I confess, not a little perplexing to me. I do not feel quite sure as to the temper of mind in which the Poet conceived some of the persons, or why he should have given them the aspect they wear in the play. For instance, Cæsar is far from being himself in these scenes; hardly one of the speeches put into his mouth can be regarded as historically characteristic; taken all together, they are little short of a downright caricature. As here represented, he is indeed little better than a grand, strutting piece of puff-paste; and when he speaks, it is very much in the style of a glorious vapourer and braggart, full of lofty airs and mock-thunder; than which nothing could be further from the truth of the man, whose character, even in his faults, was as compact and solid as adamant, and at the same time as limber and

ductile as the finest gold. Certain critics have seized and worked upon this, as proving that Shakespeare must have been very green in classical study, or else very careless in the use of his authorities. To my thinking it proves neither the one nor the other.

It is true, Cæsar's ambition was indeed gigantic, but none too much so, I suspect, for the mind it dwelt in; for his character in all its features was gigantic. And no man ever framed his ambition more in sympathy with the great forces of Nature, or built it upon a deeper foundation of political wisdom and insight. Now this "last infirmity of noble minds" is the only part of him that the play really sets before us; and even this we do not see as it was, because it is here severed from the constitutional peerage of his gifts and virtues; all those transcendant qualities which placed him at the summit of Roman intellect and manhood being either withheld from the scene, or thrown so far into the background, that the proper effect of them is mainly lost.

Yet we have ample proof that Shakespeare understood Cæsar thoroughly; and that he regarded him as "the noblest man that ever lived in the tide of times." For example, in Hamlet, he makes Horatio, who is one of his calmest and most right-thinking characters, speak of him as "the mightiest Julius." In Antony and Cleopatra, again, the heroine is made to describe him as "broad-fronted Cæsar." And in King Richard the Third, the young Prince utters these lines:

"That Julius Cæsar was a famous man;

With what his yalour did enrich his wit,
His wit set down to make his valour live:
Death makes no conquest of this conqueror."

In fact, we need not go beyond Shakespeare to gather that Julius Cæsar's was the deepest, the most versatile, and most, multitudinous head that ever figured in the political affairs of mankind.

Indeed, it is clear from this play itself that the Poet's course did not proceed at all from ignorance or misconcep

tion of the man. For it is remarkable that, though Cæsar delivers himself so out of character, yet others, both foes and friends, deliver him much nearer the truth; so that, while we see almost nothing of him directly, we nevertheiess get, upon the whole, a pretty just reflection of him. Especially, in the marvellous speeches of Antony and in the later events of the drama, both his inward greatness and his right of mastership over the Roman world are fully vindicated. For, in the play as in the history, Cæsar's blood just hastens and cements the empire which the conspirators thought to prevent. They soon find that in the popular sympathies, and even in their own dumb remorses, he has left behind powers that will work for him.” He proves indeed far mightier in death than in life; as if his spirit were become at once the guardian angel of his cause and an avenging angel to his foes.

And so it was in fact. For nothing did so much to set the people in love with royalty, both name and thing, as the reflection that their beloved Cæsar, the greatest of their national heroes, the crown and consummation of Roman genius and character, had been murdered for aspiring to it. Thus their hereditary aversion to kingship was all subdued by the remembrance of how and why their Cæsar fell; and they who, before, would have plucked out his heart rather than he should wear a crown, would now have plucked out their own, to set a crown upon his head. Such is the nat ural result when the intensities of admiration and compassion meet together in the human breast.

From all which it may well be thought that Cæsar was too great for the hero of a drama, since his greatness, if brought forward in full measure, would leave no room for any thing else, at least would preclude any proper dramatic balance and equipoise. It was only as a sort of underlying potency or a force withdrawn into the background, that his presence was compatible with that harmony and reciprocity of several characters which a well-ordered drama requires. At all events, it is pretty clear that, where he was, such

figures as Brutus and Cassius could never be very considerable, save as his assassins. They would not have been heard of in after-times, if they had not "struck the foremost man of all this world"; in other words, the great sun of Rome had to be shorn of his beams, else so ineffectual a fire as Brutus could nowise catch the eye.

Be this as it may, I have no doubt that Shakespeare knew the whole height and compass of Cæsar's vast and varied capacity. And I sometimes regret that he did not render him as he evidently saw him, inasmuch as he alone perhaps of all the men who ever wrote could have given an adequate expression of that colossal man.

I have sometimes thought that the policy of the drama may have been to represent Cæsar, not as he was indeed, but as he must have appeared to the conspirators; to make us see him as they saw him; in order that they too might have fair and equal judgment at our hands. For Cæsar was literally too great to be seen by them, save as children often see bugbears by moonlight, when their inexperienced eyes are mocked with air. And the poet may well have judged that the best way to set us right towards them was by identifying us more or less with them in mental position, and making us share somewhat in their delusion. For there is scarce any thing wherein we are so apt to err as in reference to the characters of men when time has settled and cleared up the questions in which they lost their way we blame them for not having seen as we see; while, in truth, the things that are so bathed in light to us were full of darkness to them; and we should have understood them better, had we been in the dark along with them.

Cæsar indeed was not bewildered by the political questions of his time; but all the rest were, and therefore he seemed so to them; and while their own heads were swimming they naturally ascribed his seeming bewilderment to a dangerous intoxication. As for his marvellous career of success, they attributed this mainly to his good luck; such being the common refuge of inferior minds when they would

escape the sense of their inferiority. Hence, as generally happens with the highest order of men, his greatness had to wait the approval of later events. He indeed, far beyond any other man of his age, "looked into the seeds of time”; but this was not nor could be known, till time had developed those seeds into their fruits. Why, then, may not the Poet's idea have been, so to order things that the full strength of the man should not appear in the play, as it did not in fact, till after his fall? This view, I am apt to think, will both explain and justify the strange disguise sort of falsetto greatness-under which Cæsar exhibits himself.

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Now the seeming contradiction between Cæsar as known and Cæsar as rendered by Shakespeare is what, more than any thing else in the drama, perplexes me. But there is, I think, a very refined, subtile, and peculiar irony pervading this, more than any other of the Poet's plays; not intended as such, indeed, by the speakers, but a sort of historic irony, -the irony of Providence, so to speak, or, if you please, of Fate; much the same as is implied in the proverb, “A haughty spirit goes before a fall." This irony crops out in many places. Thus we have Cæsar most blown with arrogance and godding it in the loftiest style when the daggers of the assassins are on the very point of leaping at him. So too, all along, we find Brutus most confident in those very things where he is most at fault, or acting like a man "most ignorant of what he's most assured"; as when he says that "Antony can do no more than Cæsar's arm when Cæsar's head is off." This, to be sure, is not meant ironically by him; but it is turned into irony by the fact that Antony soon tears the cause of the conspirators all to pieces with his tongue. But indeed this sort of honest guile runs all through the piece as a perfusive and permeating efficacy. A still better instance of it occurs just after the murder, when the chiefs of the conspiracy are exulting in the transcendant virtue and beneficence of their deed, and in its future stage celebrity; and Cassius says,