37

To seek you at your house. Well, I will hie,3
And so bestow these papers as you bade me.
Cass. That done, repair to Pompey's theatre. -

Come, Casca, you and I will yet, ere day,
See Brutus at his house: three parts of him
Is 38 ours already; and the man entire,
Upon the next encounter, yields him ours.

[Exit CINNA.

Casca. O, he sits high in all the people's hearts!
And that which would appear offence in us,
His countenance, like richest alchemy,3

Will change to virtue and to worthiness.

39

Cass. Him, and his worth, and our great need of him, You have right well conceited.40

Let us go,

For it is after midnight; and, ere day,

We will awake him, and be sure of him.

[Exeunt.

37 Hie is hasten. So in Hamlet, i. 1: “Th' extravagant and erring spirit

kies to his confine." And in many other places.

38 Such combinations as parts and is were not then bad grammar.

39 Alchemy is the old ideal art of turning base metals into gold.

40 Conceited is conceived, understood, or apprehended.

Bru. What, Lucius, ho!

I cannot, by the progress of the stars,

Give guess how near to day. - Lucius, I say!

I would it were my fault to sleep so soundly.
When, Lucius, when !2 Awake, I say! what, Lucius!

Bru. Get me a taper in my study, Lucius :

When it is lighted, come and call me here.

Luc. I will, my lord.

Bru. It must be by his death :3 and, for my part,

I know no personal cause to spurn at him,

But for the general. He would be crown'd :

[Exit.

How that might change his nature, there's the question :
It is the bright day that brings forth the adder; 5

1 Orchard and garden were synonymous. In Romeo and Juliet, Capulet's garden is twice called orchard.

2 When! was sometimes used as an exclamation of impatience.

3 Brutus has been casting about on all sides to find some other means to prevent Cæsar's being king, and here gives it up that this can be done only by killing him. Thus the speech opens in just the right way to throw us back upon his antecedent meditations.

4 The public cause. This use of general was common.

5 The Poet is apt to be right in his observation of Nature. In a bright warm day the snakes come out to bask in the sun. And the idea is, that the sunshine of royalty will kindle the serpent in Cæsar.

- that:

And that craves wary walking. Crown him?
And then, I grant, we put a sting in him,
That at his will he may do danger with.
Th' abuse of greatness is, when it disjoins
Remorse from power; and, to speak truth of Cæsar,
I have not known when his affections sway'd
More than his reason. But 'tis a common proof,8

That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But, when he once attains the upmost round,
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees 9
By which he did ascend: so Cæsar may ;

Then, lest he may, prevent. And, since the quarrel 10
Will bear no colour for the thing he is,

Fashion it thus, that what he is, augmented,

6 That is, do mischief with, and so be or prove dungerous.

7 Some obscurity here, owing to the use of certain words in uncommon senses. Remorse, in Shakespeare, commonly means pity or compassion: here it means conscience, or conscientiousness. Soin Othello, iii. 3: "Let him command, and to obey shall be in me remorse, what bloody work soe'er." The possession of dictatorial power is apt to stifle or sear the conscience, so as to make a man literally remorseless. Affections, again, here stands for passions, as in several other instances. Finally, reason is here used in the same sense as remorse. So the context clearly points out; and the conscience is, in a philosophical sense, the moral reason.

8 Proof for fact, or the thing proved. So in Bacon's essay Of Parents and Children: "The proof is best when men keep their authority towards their children, but not their purse"; where the meaning is, it proves, or turns out, best.

9 Base degrees is lower steps; degree being used in its primitive sense, and for the rounds of the ladder. Elsewhere the Poet has base for lower. See

Richard II., page 115, note 17.

10 Quarrel for cause. So in the 35th Psalm of The Psalter: "Stand up to judge my quarrel; avenge Thou my cause." And Shakespeare has it repeatedly so. See Macbeth, page 141, note 23.

Would run to these and these extremities: 11
And therefore think him as a serpent's egg,

Which, hatch'd, would, as his kind, grow mischievous;
And kill him in the shell.

Re-enter LUCIUS.

Luc. The taper burneth in your closet, sir.
Searching the window for a flint, I found
This paper thus seal'd up; and I am sure
It did not lie there when I went to bed.
Bru. Get you to bed again; it is not day.
Is not to-morrow, boy, the Ides of March?

Luc. I know not, sir.

Bru. Look in the calendar, and bring me word.
Luc. I will, sir.

Bru. The exhalations,12 whizzing in the air,

[Exit.

11 Something of obscurity again. But the meaning is, "Since we have no show or pretext of a cause, no assignable or apparent ground of complaint, against Cæsar, in what he is, or in any thing he has yet done, let us assume that the further addition of a crown will quite upset his nature, and metamorphose him into a serpent." The strain of casuistry used in this speech is very remarkable. Coleridge found it perplexing. Upon the supposal that Shakespeare meant Brutus for a wise and good man, the speech seems to me utterly unintelligible. But the Poet, I think, must have regarded him simply as a well-meaning, but conceited and shallow idealist; and such men are always cheating and puffing themselves with the thinnest of sophisms; feeding on air, and conceiving themselves inspired; or, as Gibbon puts it," mistaking the giddiness of the head for the illumination of the Spirit."

12 Exhalations for meteors, or meteoric lights; referring to the flashes of lightning. In Plutarch's Opinions of Philosophers, as translated by Holland, we have the following: "Aristotle supposeth that all these meteors come of a dry exhalation, which, being gotten enclosed within a moist cloud, striveth forcibly to get forth: now, by attrition and breaking together, it causeth the clap of thunder." Shakespeare has meteor repeatedly in the same way. So in Romeo and Juliet, iii. 5: "It is some meteor that the Sun exhales."

Give so much light that I may read by them.

-

[Opens the paper, and reads.

Brutus, thou sleep'st: awake and see thyself.

Shall Rome, &c. Speak, strike, redress!
Brutus, thou sleep'st: awake!

Such instigations have been often dropp'd

Where I have took them up.13

Shall Rome, &c. Thus must I piece it out:

Shall Rome stand under one man's awe? What, Rome?

My ancestor did from the streets of Rome

The Tarquin drive, when he was call'd a king. -
Speak, strike, redress! - Am I entreated, then,

To speak and strike? O Rome, I make thee promise,
If the redress will follow, thou receivest

Thy full petition at the hand of Brutus !

13 Here the Poet had in his eye the following from Plutarch: "For Brutus, his friends and countrymen, both by divers procurements and sundry rumours of the city, and by many bills also, did openly call and procure him to do that he did. For, under the image of his ancestor Junius Brutus, that drave the kings out of Rome, they wrote, 'O, that it pleased the gods thou wert now alive, Brutus!' and again, 'That thou wert here among us now! His tribunal or chair, where he gave audience during the time he was Prætor, was full of such bills: 'Brutus, thou art asleep, and art not Brutus indeed.'"- Mr. Philip Smith, in his History of the World, comments upon the matter as follows: "Brutus, having joined the Pompeian standard with reluctance, had been the first to submit after the battle of Pharsalia, and had been ever since distinguished by Cæsar's special favour. But hints which his patron was said to have dropped of Brutus's worthiness to fill his place aided the plausible appeals which his brother-in-law Cassius made to his vanity. The mind which could be caught by such tricks as placards hung upon the statue of the elder Brutus with the inscription, 'Would thou wert alive!'-by billets thrust into his own hands, bearing the words, 'Brutus, thou sleepest, thou art no Brutus!'- had as little of stern principle as the heart that could plant the last dagger in Casar's bosom had of gratitude." The same writer ascribes, and justly too, the concocting of the conspiracy to "a narrow selfish jealousy of Cæsar's ascendency."