Brutus and Cassius.

The characters of Brutus and Cassius are very nicely discriminated, scarce a word falling from either but what smacks of the man. Cassius is much the better conspirator, but much the worse man; and the better in that because the worse in this. For Brutus engages in the conspiracy on grounds of abstract and ideal justice; while Cassius holds it both a wrong and a blunder to go about such a thing without making success his first care. This, accordingly, is what he works for, being reckless of all other considerations in his choice and use of means. Withal he is more impulsive and quick than Brutus, because less under the selfdiscipline of moral principle. His motives, too, are of a much more mixed and various quality, because his habits of thinking and acting have grown by the measures of experience he studies to understand men as they are; Brutus, as he thinks they ought to be. Hence, in every case where Brutus crosses him, Brutus is wrong, and he is right, — right, that is, if success be their aim. Cassius judges, and rightly, I think, that the end should give law to the means; and that "the honourable men whose daggers have stabb'd Cæsar" should not be hampered much with conscientious scruples.

Still Brutus overawes him by his moral energy and elevation of character, and by the open-faced rectitude and purity of his principles. Brutus has no thoughts or aims that he is afraid or ashamed to avow; Cassius has many which he would fain hide even from himself. And he catches a sort of inspiration and is raised above himself by contact with Brutus. And Cassius, moreover, acts very much from personal hatred of Cæsar, as remembering how, not long before, he and Brutus had stood for the chief Prætorship of the city,

and Brutus through Cæsar's favour had got the election. And so the Poet read in Plutarch that "Cassius, being a choleric man, and hating Cæsar privately more than he did the tyranny openly, incensed Brutus against him." The effect of this is finely worked out by the Poet in the man's affected scorn of Cæsar, and in the scoffing humour in which he loves to speak of him. For such is the natural language of a masked revenge.

The tone of Cassius is further indicated, and with exquisite art, in his soliloquy where, after tempering Brutus to his purpose, and finding how his "honourable metal may be wrought," he gently slurs him for being practicable to flatteries, and then proceeds to ruminate the scheme for working upon his vanity, and thereby drawing him into the conspiracy; thus spilling the significant fact, that his own honour does not stick to practise the arts by which he thinks it is a shame to be seduced.

It is a noteworthy point also, that Cassius is too practical and too much of a politician to see any ghosts. Acting on far lower principles than his leader, and such as that leader would spurn as both wicked and base, he therefore does no violence to his heart in screwing it to the work he takes in hand: his heart is even more at home in the work than his head: whereas Brutus, from the wrenching his heart has suffered, keeps reverting to the moral complexion of his first step. The remembrance of this is a thorn in his side; while Cassius has no sensibilities of nature for such compunctions to stick upon. Brutus is never thoroughly himself after the assassination that his heart is ill at ease, is shown in a certain dogged tenacity of honour and overstraining of rectitude, as if he were struggling to make atonement with his conscience. The stab he gave Cæsar planted in his own up

right and gentle nature a germ of remorse, which, gathering strength from every subsequent adversity, came to embody itself in imaginary sights and sounds; the Spirit of Justice, made an ill angel to him by his own sense of wrong, hovering in the background of his after-life, and haunting his solitary moments in the shape of Cæsar's ghost. And so it is well done, that he is made to see the "monstrous apparition" just after his heart has been pierced through with many sorrows at hearing of Portia's shocking death.

Character of Portia.

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The delineation of Portia is completed in a few brief masterly strokes. Once seen, the portrait ever after lives an old and dear acquaintance of the reader's inner man. Like some women I have known, Portia has strength enough to do and suffer for others, but very little for herself. As the daughter of Cato and the wife of Brutus, she has set in her eye a pattern of how she ought to think and act, being father'd and husbanded"; but still her head floats merged over the ears in her heart; and it is only when affection speaks that her spirit is hushed into the listening which she would fain yield only to the speech of reason. She has a clear idea of the stoical calmness and fortitude which so noble and so graceful in her Brutus; it all lies faithfully reproduced in her mind; she knows well how to honour and admire it; yet she cannot work it into the texture of her character; she can talk it like a book, but she tries in vain to live it.

appears

Plutarch gives one most touching incident respecting her which the Poet did not use, though he transfused the sense of it into his work. It occurred some time after Cæsar's death, and when the civil war was growing to a head: “Bru

tus, seeing the state of Rome would be utterly overthrown, went to the city of Elea standing by the sea. There Portia, being ready to depart from her husband and return to Rome, did what she could to dissemble the sorrow she felt. But a certain painting bewrayed her in the end. The device was taken out of the Greek stories, how Andromache accompanied her husband Hector when he went out of Troy to the wars, and how Hector delivered her his little son, and how her eyes were never off him. Portia, seeing this picture, and likening herself to be in the same case, fell a-weeping; and coming thither oftentimes in a day to see it, she wept still." The force of this incident is indeed all reproduced in the Portia of the play; we have its full effect in the matter about her self-inflicted wound as compared with her subsequent demeanour; still I cannot help wishing the Poet had made use of the incident itself.

Portia gives herself that gash without flinching, and bears it without a murmur, as an exercise and proof of manly fortitude; and she translates her pains into smiles, all to comfort and support her husband. So long as this purpose lends her strength, she is fully equal to her thought, because here her heart keeps touch perfectly with her head. But, this motive gone, the weakness, if it be not rather the strength, of her woman's nature rushes full upon her; her feelings rise into an uncontrollable flutter, and run out at every joint and motion of her body; and nothing can arrest the inward mutiny till affection again whispers her into composure, lest she spill something that may hurt or endanger her Brutus. O noble Portia ! Well might the poet Campbell say, "For the picture of that wedded pair, at once august and tender, human nature and the dignity of conjugal faith are indebted."

Mark Antony.

A rounded analysis of Antony belongs to a later period, when his native aptitudes for vice were warmed into full development by the charms of the great Egyptian sorceress ; and only a few of his points as set forth in this play call for present notice. His unreserved adulation of Cæsar, and reckless purveying to Cæsar's dangerous weakness in craving to be called a king when he already had far more than kingly power, and while the obvious part of a friend was to warn him from it and help him against it, this is wisely retained by the Poet as one of Antony's characteristic traits. Then too we have apt indications here and there of his proneness to those vicious levities and debasing luxuries which afterwards ripened into such a gigantic profligacy. He has not yet attained to that rank and full-blown combination of cruelty, perfidy, and voluptuousness, which the world associates with his name, but he is plainly on the way to it. His profound and wily dissimulation, while knitting up the hollow truce with the assassins on the very spot where “ great Cæsar fell," is managed with admirable skill; his deep spasms of grief being worked out in just the right way to quench their suspicions, and make them run into the toils, when he calls on them to render him their bloody hands. Nor have they any right to complain, for he is but paying them in their own coin; and we think none the worse of him, that he fairly outdoes them at their own practice.

But Antony's worst parts as here delivered are his exultant treachery in proposing to use his colleague Lepidus as at once the pack-horse and the scape-goat of the Triumvirate, and his remorseless savagery in arranging for the slaughter of all that was most illustrious in Rome, bartering