It was a firm belief among the Romans, as among all the nations of antiquity, that the gods did, by certain signs and tokens, give man the opportunity of learning their will. The explanation of these signs was reduced to a system, which it was the duty of the augurs to examine, study, and transmit. 204. That unicorns.. trees. Similarly Spenser tells us Guyon

eluded Pyrochles:

'Like as a lyon whose imperial powre

A prowde, rebellious unicorn defyes,

T' avoide the rash assault and wrathful stowre
Of his fiers foe, him to a tree applyes,
And when, him roaming in full course he spyes,
He slips aside; the whiles that furious beast
His precious horn, sought of his enimyes,
Strikes in the stocke, ne thence can be releast,
But to the mighty victor yields a bounteous feast'
-Faerie Queen, II, v, 10-18.

205. Bears with glasses. See Somerville's The Chase, iii, 294-307. Ib. Elephants with holes. Somerville also supplies an account of

this stratagem in The Chase, iii, 266-286. 208. Then most flattered. 'It hath been well said [Plutarch's De Adulatione et Amico, xi] that the arch-flatterer, with whom all the petty flatterers have intelligence, is a man's selfe'Bacon's Essays, 'Of Love,' edition 1612.

212. To fetch. There is here probably an equivoque intended. To fetch, in one sense, would signify, 'to bring him on his way with due attendance' (see Henry V, V, chorus, 28:

'Go forth and fetch their conquering Cæsar in;')

but in the other 'to execute our treachery on him.' See Much Ado about Nothing, I, i, 225:

'Claudius. You speak thus to fetch me in, my lord.' 225. Let.... purposes. See Macbeth, I, v, 64-67. 230. Honey heavy-sweetly-oppressive-E. H. SEYMOUR. 250. Humour.

The mood or state of the moment, accidental or exceptional condition, caprice, whim, etc. By the old physicians, blood, phlegm, choler, and melancholy were the four different moistures of the human body, and whichever of these predominated, determined the temper, the health, and the prevailing manners of men.

300. A voluntary wound. Valerius Maximus, in his De Forttudine, iii, 15, gives an account of this hardihood of will. 308. Charactery-secret meaning of the marks or lines of care. 333, 334. It sufficeth that Brutus leads me on. Similarly Horace's 'Nil desperandum, Teucro duce et auspice Teucro'-Carmina, I, vii, 27. ('Nothing needs be despaired of, fear begone,

While Teucer guides, and Teucer leads us on.")

SCENE II.

12. Vanquished. In folio 1623, 'vanished.'

25. Use wont, usual occurrence.

32, 33. Cowards die. . . . death but once. The Earl of Essex, in a letter to Lord Rutland, says: 'As he which dieth nobly doth

live for ever, so he that doth live in fear doth die continually.' Similarly John Marston in The Insatiate Countess, 1613:

'A hundred times in life a coward dies.'

46. Are. Folio 1623 reads heare, perhaps for were. 67. Greybeards-a half-contemptuous term for senators, members of the deliberative body appointed at Rome to advise for the good of the state and take means for the safety of it. They were men whose wisdom was matured by age and experience, and bore the title of Fathers of the State; but Cæsar had himself vulgarised the senate by more than doubling its number during his fourth dictatorship.

76. She dreamt, etc. Valerius Maximus, in his Exemplorum Memorabilium Libri Novem. De Somnis, I, ii, mentions this dream: Calpurnia, the wife of the god-like Julius, father of his country, on the night which he last spent upon the earth, saw him, in her sleep, lying on her breast, stricken with many wounds; and terrified greatly by the horror of her dream, besought that he would refrain from going out next day to the meeting of the senate.' See also Dion Cassius, xliv, 17.

88. Press. Dr Hugh Blair thought that some lines had been lost between this line and the following one.

99. Cæsar's wife shall meet with better dreams. 'With Julius Cæsar Decimus Brutus had obtained that interest, as he set him down in his testament for heire-in-remainder, after his nephew. And this was the man that had power with him to draw him forth to his death; for when Cæsar would have discharged the senate, in regard to some ill presages, and especially a dream of Calpurnia, this man lifted him gently by the arme out of his chaire, telling him he hoped he would not dismisse the senate til his wife had dreamed a better dreame. And it seemeth his favour was so greate, as Antonius, in a letter which is recited verbatim in one of Cicero's Philippiques, calleth him Venefica, witch! as if he had enchanted Cæsar'-Bacon's Essays, 'Of Friendship,' 1625. This extract, perhaps, indicates how the scene was acted. 104. Liable-bound, to be subject, servile-King John, ii, 490; Pericles, IV, vi, 179.

129. Every like is not the same. 'Like's an ill mark'-' Le vraisemblable n'est pas toujours le vrai.'

SCENE III.

6. Security gives way to conspiracy. Judges xviii, 7-10. So in Macbeth, III, v, 32, Hecate declares that

and Hector, in Troilus and Cressida (II, ii, 14) urges that— 'The wound of peace is surety,

8. Artemidorus.

Surety secure.'

There was a work published in 1606, entitled Artemidorus: The Judgment or Exposition of Dreames. 12. Emulation - malicious rivalry. See Coriolanus, I, i, 218; Troilus and Cressida, II, ii, 212. The word is now used in the good sense of 'generous rivalry.'

14. The fates-Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos.

The first spins the thread of human life, the second assigns its length, and the third snips it at the close. To them, both gods and men must submit; they are the divinities of the unavoidable.

SCENE IV.

9. Women to keep counsel. Referring to the proverb, ‘A woman conceals what she does not know.'

22. About the ninth hour. 'Observe how strongly Shakespeare marks the passage of time up to the moment of Cæsar's death; night [I, iii, 163], dawn [II, i, 101], eight o'clock [II, ii, 114], nine o'clock, that our suspense may be heightened and our interest kept upon the strain'-Prof. Edward Dowden's Shakespeare: His Mind and Art, p. 295.

ACT III.-SCENE I.

1. Capitol. The senate sitting. According to Dion Cassius (xliv, 52), the senate was assembled in the curia which Pompey had built. The temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus at Rome, so called because a human head (caput) was turned up while digging the foundations, was situated on the southern summit of the Mons Capitolinus. The Rev. John Hunter, M.A., remarks that it is not easy to conjecture why Shakespeare has departed from the truth of history in making the Capitol, instead of the curia of Pompey, the scene of Cæsar's murder.' The plainest probability seems to be, that when people talked of Rome, the Capitol rose most readily in their minds; and Shakespeare having to deal dramatically with his subject, chose the Capitol, because around it the greater

and grander associations relative to Rome were clustered.
This error, however, is not Shakespeare's only; it is as old
as Chaucer's time, at any rate; for in The Monke's Tale to
the Canterbury pilgrims we read:

"This Julius [Cæsar] to the Capitoile wente
Upon a day as he was wont to goon;
And in the Capitoile anoon hym hente
This fals Brutus and his other foon,
And stiked hym with boydekyns anoon

With many a wounde, and thus they let hym lye;
But never gront he at no strook but oon,

Or els at two, but if the storye lye '-712-719.

37. Couchings. Compare-Issachar is a young ass couching down between two burdens'-Gen. xlix, 14. Hanmer and Collier's MS. Corrector suggest crouchings,' and Dr Craik agrees with them. However, this word, from Fr. coucher, 'to lie,' was formerly employed with the same meaning, e.g., in The Mirror of Magistrates:

'The majesty that kings to people beare,

The stately porte, the awful cheere they showe,

Doth make the meane to shrinke and couch for fear-Fol. 260b.

48, 49. Know, Cæsar.... satisfied. J. O. Halliwell remarks, folio Shakespeare, vol. xiii, p. 375: The text [of this play] appears to be, on the whole, a reliable one; but that some liberties have been taken with it, may be surmised from the fact of the well-known passage ridiculed by Ben Jonson being altered in the printed copy,' 1623. He then rightly observes: 'If wrong is taken in the sense of injury or harm, as Shakespeare sometimes uses it (1 Henry IV, I, v, 101; IV, vii, 50; Cæsar, III, i, 170, etc.), there is no absurdity in the line.' This will more specially appear if we interpret 'just cause,' as in A Winter's Tale, V, i, 61, as signifying sufficient reason. The original Oxymoron may be compared with those used, 2 Cor. vi, 8-10, and Matt. xvi, 25.

Professor Craik suggests that the passage was changed in deference to Ben Jonson's criticism. "This is very possible,' J. R. Lowell remarks; 'but we suspect that the pen that blotted them was in the hand of Master Heminge or his colleague. The moral confusion in the idea was surely admirably characteristic of the general who had just accomplished a successful coup-d'état, the condemnation of which he would fancy that he read in the face of every honest man he met, and which he would therefore be for ever indirectly palliating'-Among my Books, p. 152, note. But is not this eally a boast modelled on Cæsar's favourite quotation from Euripides, 'If any violation of the law is excusable, it is excusable for the sake of gaining sovereign power' (quoted by Cicero in his De Officiis, iii, 21); and is it not precisely parallelled in form by

Dyce, Halliwell, Ingleby, etc., all agree that the passage should be restored from Ben Jonson's hints, and be printed

thus:

'Cæsar.

Metellus C.
Cæsar.

60. Pray should probably be sway.

78. Et tu, Brute?-'Thou also, O Brutus!' 'The only ancient authority, I believe, for this famous exclamation is in Suetonius, i, 82, where Cæsar is made to address Brutus, Kai σù TÉKVOV (“And thou too, my son ") !'—G. L. Craik's English of Shakespeare, p. 190. The Latin word Brutus means senseless,' 'stupid.' This phrase has been turned into a play upon words in Hamlet, where, when Polonius boasts, I did enact Julius Cæsar; I was killed i' the Capitol; Brutus killed me,' Hamlet says, punningly, if not pungently, 'It was a Brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there!"

'The poet has in a wonderful manner put in the mouth of the falling Cæsar, at sight of Brutus, the Latin words Et tu, Brute? to give greater emphasis to the painful surprise of his fatherly friend, who would never have expected to have seen Brutus among his murderers Gervinus' Shakespeare Commentaries, p. 707.

81, 231, 252. Pulpits. The rostra from which the Roman orators addressed the public assemblies. The elevated platform, at the south side of the lower forum, adorned with naval trophies, beaks of ships, etc. (hence its name Rostra), won from the Antiates (B. C. 338). Beneath these rostra, at the funeral of any great public character, the pompa funeris, or funeral procession, after having been marshalled into the Forum by a designator, halted. Thereupon one of the relatives or admirers of the deceased ascended the pulpit and delivered a panegyrical eloge (solemnis laudatio) on the person about to be interred. See III, ii, 62, where it is called 'the public chair.'

85. Go to the pulpit, Brutus.

'We have now taken leave of Casca; Shakespeare knew that he had a sufficient number of heroes on his hands, and was glad to lose an individual in the crowd. Casca's singularity of manners would have appeared to little advantage amid the succeeding war and tumult'S. W. SINGER.

87. Mutiny-uproar, tumult, commotion.

90. Cheer-from the Italian, Ciéra (ishera), countenance, appearance, look. Midsummer Night's Dream, III, ii, 96:

'All fancy-sick she is, and pale of cheer.'
K