Now could I, Casca,

Name to thee a man most like this dreadful night;
That thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars
As doth the lion in the Capitol:

A man no mightier than thyself, or me,
In personal action; yet prodigious grown,
And fearful, as these strange eruptions are.
Casca. "Tis Caesar that you mean: Is it not, Cassius?
Cussius. LET IT BE WHO IT IS: for Romans now

Have thewes and limbs like to their ancestors;
But, woe the while! our fathers' minds are dead,
And we are govern'd with our mothers' spirits;
Our yoke and sufferance shows us womanish.
Casca. Indeed, they say, the senators to-morrow
Mean to establish Caesar as a king.

And he shall wear his crown by sea, and land,
In every place, save here in Italy.

Cassius. I know where I will wear this dagger then;
Cassius from bondage will deliver Cassius :
Therein, ye gods, you make the weak most strong;
Therein, ye gods, you tyrants do defeat:
Nor STONY TOWER, nor walls of beaten brass,
Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron,
Can be retentive to the strength of spirit.
If I know this, know all the world besides,
That part of tyranny, that I do bear,
I can shake off at pleasure.

So every bondman in his own hand bears
The power to cancel his captivity.

Cassius. And why should Caesar be a tyrant then?
Poor man! I know, he would not be a wolf,
But that he sees the Romans are but sheep

He were no lion, were not Romans hinds.

Those that with haste will make a mighty fire,
Begin it with weak straws: What trash is Rome,
What rubbish, and what offal, when it serves
For the base matter to illuminate

So vile a thing as Caesar?
Where hast thou led me?

But, O grief!

I, perhaps, speak this

BEFORE A WILLING BONDMAN; then I know
My answer must be made: But I am arm'd
And dangers are to me indifferent.

Casca. You speak to Casca; and to such a man,
That is no fleering tell-tale. Hold my hand:
Be factious for redress of all these griefs:

Cassius.

And I will set this foot of mine as far,
As who goes farthest.

There's a bargain made.

This is sufficiently explicit, an unprejudiced listener would be inclined to say-indeed, it is difficult to conceive how any more positively instructive exhibition of the subject, could well have been made. Certainly no one can deny that this fact of the personal helplessness, the physical weakness of those in whom this arbitrary power over the liberties and lives of others is vested, seems for some reason or other to have taken strong possession of the Poet's imagination. For how else, otherwise should he reproduce it so often, so elaborately under such a variety of forms?-with such a stedfastness and pertinacity of purpose?

The fact that the power which makes these personalities so 'prodigious,' so 'monstrous,' overshadowing the world, ‘shaming the Age' with their 'colossal' individualities, no matter what new light, what new gifts of healing for its ills, that age has been endowed with, levelling all to their will, contracting all to the limit of their stinted nature, making of all its glories but 'rubbish, offal to illuminate their vileness,' the fact that the power which enables creatures like these, to convulse nations with their whims, and deluge them with blood, at their pleasure, which puts the lives and liberties of the noblest, always most obnoxious to them, under their heel- the fact that this power resides after all, not in these persons themselves, — that they are utterly helpless, pitiful, contemptible, in themselves; but that it exists in the 'thewes and limbs' of those who are content to be absorbed in their personality, who are content to make muscles for them, in those who are content to be mere machines for the only one man's' will and passion to operate with, the fact that this so fearful power lies all in the consent of those who suffer from it, is the fact which this Poet wishes to be permitted to communicate, and which he will communicate in one form or another, to those whom it concerns to know it.

-

It is a fact, which he is not content merely to state, how

ever, in so many words, and so have done with it. He will impress it on the imagination with all kinds of vivid representation. He will exhaust the splendours of his Art in uttering it. He will leave a statement on this subject, profoundly philosophical, but one that all the world will be able to comprehend eventually, one that the world will never be able to unlearn.

The single individual helplessness of the man whom the multitude, in this case, were ready to arm with unlimited power over their own welfare-that physical weakness, already so strenuously insisted on by Cassius, at last attains its climax in the representation, when, in the midst of his haughtiest display of will and personal authority, stricken by the hands of the men he scorned, by the hand of one 'he had just spurned like a cur out of his path,' he falls at the foot of Pompey's statueor, rather, 'when at the base of Pompey's statua he lies along' amid all the noise, and tumult, and rushing action of the scene that follows-through all its protracted arrangements, its speeches, and ceremonials — not unmarked, indeed, -the centre of all eyes,-but, mute, motionless, a thing of pity, 'A PIECE OF BLEEDING EARTH.'

That helpless cry in the Tiber, 'Save me, Cassius, or I sink' that feeble cry from the sick man's bed in Spain, 'Give me some drink, Titinius!'-and all that pitiful display of weakness, moral and physical, at the would-be coronation, which Casca's report conveys so unsparingly- the falling down in the street speechless, which Cassius emphasises with his scornful What? did CAESAR SWOON?' — all this makes but a part of the exhibition, which the lamentations of Mark Antony complete:

'O mighty Caesar, dost thou lie so low?

Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils,

Shrunk to this little measure?'

This? and the eye' of the spectator, more learned than 'his ear,' follows the speaker's eye, and measures it.

'Fare thee well.

But yesterday the word of Caesar might

Have stood against the world: now lies he there.
And none so poor, to do him reverence.'

The Poet's tone breaks through Mark Antony's; the Poet's finger points, now lies he there'- there!

That form which lies there,' with its mute eloquence speaking this Poet's word, is what he calls 'a Transient Hieroglyphic,' which makes, he says, 'a deeper impression on minds of a certain order, than the language of arbitrary signs;' and his 'delivery' on the most important questions will be found, upon examination, to derive its principal emphasis from a running text in this hand. says, 'action is eloquence, and the learned than the ears.'

For, in such business,' he

eyes of the ignorant more

Or, as he puts it in another place: What is sensible always strikes the memory more strongly, and sooner impresses itself, than what is intellectual. Thus the memory of brutes is excited by sensible, but not by intellectual things. And therefore it is easier to retain the image of a sportsman hunting, than of the corresponding notion of invention of an apothecary ranging his boxes, than of the corresponding notion of disposition of an orator making a speech, than of the term Eloquence or a boy repeating verses, than the term Memory or of A PLAYER acting his part, than the corresponding notion of-- ACTION.'

So, also,' Tom o' Bedlam' was a better word for 'houseless misery,' than all the king's prayer, good as it was, about 'houseless heads, and unfed sides,' in general, and 'looped, and windowed raggedness.'

'We construct,' says this author, in another place — rejecting the ordinary history as not suitable for scientific purposes, because it is 'varied, and diffusive, and confounds and disturbs the understanding, unless it be fixed and exhibited in due order'- we construct 'tables and combinations of instances, upon such a plan and in such order, that the understanding may be enabled to act upon them.'

CHAPTER II.

CAESAR'S SPIRIT.

I'll meet thee at Phillippi.

IN N Julius Caesar, the most splendid and magnanimous representative of arbitrary power is selected—' the foremost man of all the world,'—even by the concession of those who condemn him to death; so that here it is the mere abstract question as to the expediency and propriety of permitting any one man to impose his individual will on the nation. Whatever personalities are involved in the question here - with Brutus, at least tend to bias the decision in his favour. For so he tells us, as with agitated step he walks his orchard on that wild night which succeeds his conference with Cassius, revolving his part, and reading, by the light of the exhalations whizzing in the air, the papers that have been found thrown in at his study window.

'It must be by his death: and, for my part,

I know no personal cause to spurn at him,

BUT FOR THE GENERAL. He would be crown'd:-
How that might change his nature, there's the question.

It is the bright day that brings forth the adder;

And that craves wary walking. Crown him? That ;-
And then, I grant, we put a sting in him,
That at his will he may do danger with.

The abuse of greatness is, when it disjoins

Remorse from power: And, to speak truth of Caesar,
I have not known when his affections sway'd
More than his reason. But 't is a common proof,
That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber upward turns his face :
But when he once attains the utmost round,

He then unto the ladder turns his back,

Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend: So Caesar may;

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