idealist as Brutus is made to overtop and outshine the greatest practical genius the world ever saw, what is it but a refined and subtile irony at work on a much larger scale, and diffusing itself, secretly, it may be, but not the less vitally, into the texture? It was not the frog that thought irony, when he tried to make himself as big as the ox; but there was a pretty decided spice of irony in the mind that conceived the fable.

It is to be noted further, that Brutus uniformly speaks of Cæsar with respect, almost indeed with admiration. It is his ambition, not his greatness, that Brutus resents; the thought that his own consequence is impaired by Cæsar's elevation having no influence with him. With Cassius, on the contrary, impatience of his superiority is the ruling motive: he is all the while thinking of the disparagement he suffers by Cæsar's exaltation.

This man

Is now become a god; and Cassius is

A wretched creature, and must bend his body,

If Cæsar carelessly but nod on him.

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus; and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs.

Thus he overflows with mocking comparisons, and finds his pastime in flouting at Cæsar as having managed, by a sham heroism, to hoodwink the world.

And yet the Poet makes Cæsar characterize himself very much as Cassius, in his splenetic temper, describes him. Cæsar gods it in his talk, as if on purpose to approve the style in which Cassius mockingly gods him. This, taken by itself, would look as if the Poet sided with Cassius; yet one can hardly help feeling that he sympathized rather in

Antony's great oration. And the sequel, as we have seen, justifies Antony's opinion of Cæsar. Thus, it seems to me, the subsequent course of things has the effect of inverting. the mockery of Cassius against himself; as much as to say, "You have made fine work with your ridding the world of great Cæsar since your daggers pricked the gas out of him. you see what a grand humbug he was."

In sober truth, the final issue of the conspiracy, as repre sented by Shakespeare, is a pretty conclusive argument of the blunder, not to say the crime, of its authors. Cæsar, dead, tears them and their cause all to pieces. In effect, they did but stab him into a mightier life; so that Brutus might well say, as indeed he does at last,

O Julius Cæsar, thou art mighty yet!

Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords

In our own proper entrails.

Am I wrong, then, in regarding the Nemesis which asserts itself so sternly in the latter part of the play, as a reflex of irony on some of the earlier scenes? I the rather take this view, inasmuch as it infers the disguise of Cæsar to be an instance of the profound guile with which Shakespeare sometimes plays upon his characters, humouring their bent, and then leaving them to the discipline of events.*

*Julius Cæsar is indeed protagonist of the tragedy: but it is not the Cæsar whose bodily presence is weak, whose mind is declining in strength and sure-footed energy,- the Cæsar who stands exposed to all the accidents of fortune. It is the spirit of Cæsar which is the dominant power of the tragedy: against this - the spirit of Cæsar - Brutus fought; but Brutus, who for ever errs in practical politics, succeeded only in striking down Cæsar's body: he who had been weak now rises as pure spirit, strong and terrible, and avenges himself upon the conspirators. The contrast between the weakness of Cæsar's bodily presence in the first half of the play, and the might of his spiritual presence in the latter half, is emphasized and perhaps

The Cæsar of History.

Merivale justly affirms Julius Cæsar to be "the greatest name in history." And I believe the general verdict of mankind pronounces him at once the greatest soldier and the greatest statesman of the world. In oratory, also, he is acknowledged to have stood second only to Cicero at the time, while, as an author, he ranks among the best and highest of our Latin classics. Therewithal he was a perfect gentleman; and of the world's great military conquerors he is probably the only one to whom that title can be justly applied. All the sweetness of humanity seems to have been concentrated in his native temper and disposition. Nor were his virtues less eminent than his talents and genius; while the immense power to which he attained served, apparently, but to give his virtues larger scope and render them more conspicuous: so that his rightful seat is among the loveliest, the largest-hearted, the most magnanimous of men.

Julius Cæsar loved Rome, too, at least as well as any of his haters did, and loved her a thousand times more wisely. But it was his peculiar lot, perhaps I should rather say his special mission, to contend-alone and single-handed in the fore-front, though, to be sure, with the great body of the Roman people at his back with the proudest, the powerfullest,

over-emphasized by Shakespeare. It was the error of Brutus that he failed to perceive wherein lay the true Cæsarean power, and acted with shortsighted eagerness and violence. Mark Antony, over the dead body of his lord, announces what is to follow: "Over thy wounds now do I prophesy," &c. The ghost of Cæsar, which appears on the night before the battle of Philippi, serves as a kind of visible symbol of the vast posthumous power of the Dictator. Finally, the little effort of the aristocrat republicans sinks to the ground, foiled and crushed by the force which they had hoped to abolish by one violent blow.— – DOWDEN.

and the wickedest oligarchy that ever afflicted the world. This senatorial faction, small in number, but terrible in malignant activity, were, and long had been, intent on prostituting ali the powers of the Roman State to their own base, selfish, sinister ends with a few individual exceptions, they seemed to cherish the illustrious traditions of their country only as a license for their atrocious cupidity and lust. They could not be made to comprehend that either the foreign nations whom they conquered or the other classes of their own nation had any rights which they were bound to respect: practically at least, as the thing stood to their mind, all other men were created but for the one sole purpose that they might fleece them, plunder them, prey upon them. And they, they it was who were slowly murdering the liberties and the Constitution of their country, by their hideous corruption, avarice, profligacy, rapacity, inhumanity. From the very outset of his public career, Cæsar deliberately set his whole. mind and bent all his matchless energies to the work of rescuing so much of the liberty and Constitution of old Rome as it was yet possible to save from the stanchless greed, the remorseless tyranny, the monstrous sensuality, which were rendering the Roman name an intolerable stench in the nostrils of Heaven and Earth. Such as they were, Cæsar wrestled with them many a long year, till he finally outwrestled and overthrew them, and thereby delivered the groaning nations from their dreadful misrule. When they could no longer meet him in open fight, they found him as wise and merciful in peace as he had been heroic and irresistible in war; so that no means were left them for putting him down but those which they used at last, smiles concealing daggers, kisses, to make way for stabs.

In the process of his work, this mighty man approved him

self to be in no sort a philosophic enthusiast or patriotic dreamer. With his clear, healthy, practical mind, which no ideal or sentimental infatuation could get hold of, he stood face to face with men and things as they were. It was not in his line therefore to bid old "Time run back and fetch the age of gold." He knew he would not have been Julius Cæsar if he had not known- that it was both criminal and weak to suppose that the great wicked Rome of his day was to be crushed back into the smaller and better Rome of a bygone age. If he sought to imperialize the State, and himself at its head, it was because he knew that Rome, as she then was, must have a master, and that himself was the the fittest man for that office. We can all now see, what he alone saw then, that the great social and political forces of the Roman world had long been moving and converging irresistibly to that end. He was not to be deluded with the hope of reversing or postponing the issue of such deep-working causes. The great danger of the time lay in struggling to keep up a republic in show, when they already had an empire in fact. And Cæsar's statesmanship was of that high and comprehensive reach which knows better than to outface political necessities with political theories. For it is an axiom in government, no less than in science, that Nature will not be the servant of men who are too brain-sick or too proud to perceive and respect her laws. The only mode of inducing her powers to work for us is by learning their terms and letting them have their own way. There is nothing in which this holds more true than in respect of those vast moral energies which evolve and shape the life of States and empires; and which no conscious power of man can prevent, because their working is so deep and silent as not to be known, till the results are fully prepared. Here, indeed, man's best