Queen was always at hand, pampering his grosser appetites with rank and furious indulgences, and stimulating his flagging zest in them by cunning surprises: whenever he showed a reviving taste for nobler pleasures, she was prompt to gratify it with works of art and literature; and sometimes, when the mood was on, she would call in the aids of philosophy and criticism, to reinforce the spells under which she held him. At length, she wound up the climax of extravagance by arraying herself in the garb and claiming the prerogatives of the goddess Isis, at the same time inducing Antony to usurp the titles and attributes of the god Osiris. The notion that a man might rise to union with deity had gradually hardened into a custom of admitting the royal right of apotheosis. Some yours before, Antony had assumed the character and style of Bacchus at Athens. He now came forth as the Nile-god, or fructifying power of the Coptic mythology, to claim the religious veneration of the Egyptian people.

All these mad doings were closely watched by the coldblooded and astute Octavius, who worked them with terrible effect against his rival at Rome. And his purpose herein was greatly furthered by the noble behaviour of Octavia, who still kept her husband's house at Rome, and devoted herself religiously to the care of his children, both her own and those that Fulvia had borne him, as if she thought of nothing but to approve herself in every thing a true and loyal wife. By this course she only knit the hearts of the Roman people still more firmly to her cause; so that they resented Antony's sins against her almost as much as they did those against the national honour and religion. The quarrel thus engendered and fostered came to a head in the great battle of Actium, which ɔk place in September of the year B. C. 31. Stripped covered with shame and foul disho. our, Antony returned to Egypt to brood sullenly over the past. The next year, Octavius followed with an army, and his work there was finished by the death of Cleopatra in August. So that the

fleet and army, and

events of the play cover a period of a little more than ten years; the scene shifting to various parts of the Empire, Alexandria, Rome, Misenum, Athens, the plains of Syria, and several fields of battle.

I must add one more short passage from Plutarch as aptly showing the minuteness of detail with which the drama follows the history. It refers to the intercourse of Octavius and Antony after the marriage of the latter with Octavia: "With Antony there was a soothsayer of Egypt, that could judge of men's nativities, to tell what should happen to them. He, either to please Cleopatra, or because he found it so by his art, told Antony that his fortune, which of itself was good and great, was altogether blemished and obsc red by Cæsar's; and therefore he counselled him to get as 1. from him as he could. 'For thy demon,' said he, that is, the good angel that keepeth thee, is afraid of his; and, being courageous and high when alone, becometh fearful and timorous when near the other.' Howsoever it was, the events ensuing proved the Egyptian's words true: for it is said that as often as they drew cuts for pastime, or whether they played at dice, Antony always lost. Oftentimes, when they were disposed to see cockfights, or quails that were taught to fight one with another, Cæsar's cocks or quails did ever overcome. The which spited Antony in his mind, although he made no outward show of it; and therefore he believed the Egyptian the better."

Judging by my own experience, Antony and Cleopatra is the last of Shakespeare's plays that one grows to appreciate. This seems partly owing to the excellences of the work, and partly not; For it is marked beyond any other by a superabundance external animation, as well as by a surpassing fineness of workmanship, such as needs oftrepeated and most careful perusal to bring out full upon the mind's eye. The great number and variety of events crowded together in it, the rapidity with which they pass

before us, and, consequently, the frequent changes of scene, hold curiosity on the stretch, and somewhat overfill the mind with sensuous effect, so as for a long time to distract and divert the thoughts from those subtilties of characterization and delicacies of poetry which everywhere accompany them. In the redundancy of incidental interest and excitement, one cannot without long familiarity so possess his faculties as to pause and take time for such recondite and protean efficacies to work their proper effect. I am by no means sure but the two things naturally go together; yet I have to confess it has long seemed to me, that by selecting fewer incidents, or by condensing the import and spirit of them into larger masses, what is now a serious fault in the drama might have been avoided.

Bating this defect, if indeed it be a defect, there is none of Shakespeare's plays which, after many years of study, leaves a profounder impression of his greatness. In quantity and variety of characterization, it is equalled by few, and hardly surpassed by any, of his dramas. Antony, Cleopatra, Octavius, Octavia, Lepidus, Pompey, Enobarbus, not to mention divers others of still less presence on the scene, are perfectly discriminated and sustained to the last; all being wrought out in such distinct, self-centred, and selfrounded individuality, that we contract and keep up a sort of personal acquaintance with each and every one of them. In respect of style and diction, too, the best qualities of the Poet's best period are here concentrated in special force. The play abounds, more than any other, in those sharp, instantaneous jets of poetic rapture, a kind of vital ecstasy, which keep the experienced reader's mind all aglow with animation and inward delight. The compressed and flashing energy, striking in new light from the very hardness of that which resists; the stern and solid ground-work of thought, with fresh images, or suggestions of images, shooting up from it ever and anon, kindling the imagination with all the force of surprise, and setting their path on fire by the suddenness and swiftness of their coming; while their

"piercing sweetness" prints a relish on the taste that adds zest and spirit to the whole preparation;— such, not indeed exclusively, but in a peculiar degree, are the characteristics of this astonishing drama.

But I hardly dare speak my own sense of the work without the support of better judgments. "Of all Shakespeare's historical plays," says Coleridge, "Antony and Cleopatra is by far the most wonderful. There is not one in which he has followed history so minutely, and yet there are few in which he impresses the notion of angelic strength so much; perhaps none in which he impresses it more strongly. The highest praise, or rather form of praise, which I can offer in my own mind, is the doubt which the perusal always occasions in me, whether this play is not, in all the exhibitions of a giant power in its strength and vigour of maturity, a formidable rival of Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet, and Othello. Feliciter audax is the motto for its style comparatively with that of Shakespeare's other works, even as it is the general motto of all his works compared with those of other poets."

Nor is this "happy valiancy" by any means confined to the matter of style. The drama is equally daring, equally audacious, in a moral sense. For, as regards the hero and heroine, it is a noteworthy point how little we feel or think of any moral or immoral quality in their doings. In their intoxication of empire, of self-aggrandizement, and of mutual passion, they fairly overshoot the whole region of duty and obligation. To themselves and to each other, they are simply gods: as such, their freedom is absolute: they transcend all relative measures, and know no centre or source of law outside of their own personality: their own wills are their ultimate reason, their supreme law; the moral gravitation of the world having, as it were, no hold upon them, nor any right to control them. We have a hint of this in the opening of the play, when Cleopatra says, "I'll set a bourn how far to be belov'd," and Antony replies, "Then must thou needs find out new heaven, new earth." And still more a little

after, when he crowns her enchanting banter with the words,

"Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch

Of the rang'd empire fall! Here is my space.
Kingdoms are clay : our dungy earth alike
Feeds beast as man: the nobleness of life
Is to do thus; when such a mutual pair,
And such a twain can do't; in which I bind,
On pain of punishment, the world to weet
We stand up peerless."

But are they in any sort excusably sincere in all this? I answer, Yes, they are. For, in the first place, the passion which mainly absorbs them naturally carries with it a sense of infinitude, insomuch that all things else seem as nothing in comparison either with itself or with its object. And, in the second place, as I have already observed, the Eastern notions of human apotheosis had gradually invaded and leavened the mind of the West. This was most notably exemplified in the national deification of the great Julius soon after his death; which evidently could not have been done, but that the Roman mind had long been in a secret course of preparation for it. Practically the same thing was done with Augustus and his successors even before their death. And indeed it may well be thought that nothing less than a reputed deity in human form would then suffice to hold the Roman world in order; a deep social need thus suggesting and shaping the individual faith. An attenuated form of the same thing has survived even down to our time in the doctrine of the divine right of kings and the divine right of bishops: whether it ought to have survived or not, is beside my present purpose.

Now there is no good reason why the great Roman Triumvir and the angelic "serpent of old Nile" should not have shared in this common belief of their time. The Poet freely grants them the benefit of this delusion, at the same time lending them all the aid of his genus, that they may play it out to their heart's content, and also to its legitimate results in the fate that so sternly shuts down upon them at last.