greatness, but had not formed a true conception of it himself. The play would have been a better play had Cæsar been invested with all his real virtues and vices, his affected clemency and real ferocity, his admiration for virtue and his passion for vice, his love of country and his resolution to enslave that country. Among recent writers, Mommsen and Louis Napoleon attempted the same deification with still less success than Shakespeare, and in proportion as history is studied will this accomplished despot be less and less esteemed.

However, the interest of Shakespeare's play attaches less to Cæsar than to Brutus, though in the exhibition of his character also Shakespeare gives proof of an inclination to interpret Plutarch's narrative to his disparagement. The biographer tells us that inflammatory placards were pasted on the statue of Junius Brutus and otherwise brought to the notice of Marcus; but Shakespeare represents Cassius, his brother-in-law, playing upon Brutus's vanity, and stimulating him to assassinate Cæsar, by papers thrown in at his window. In this way he is lowered in the estimation of the audience as one who is actuated, in some degree at least, by meaner motives than love of country and hatred of despotism. But Cassius, who had married Brutus's sister Julia, had ample opportunities of exerting otherwise than by such means whatever influence he possessed over Brutus. In truth, however, the way in which their names are coupled by history expresses their places in the conspiracy. We nowhere read of Cassius and Brutus, but of Brutus and Cassius-that is, the leader and the follower, the greater and the lesser man. Afterwards Shakespeare recovers himself, and restores Brutus to his true place in the tempestuous events of the times. Even his worst enemy, Antony, is con

strained by conscience to give him the first place among the conspirators :

This was the noblest Roman of them all.

His life was gentle; and the elements
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, This was a man!

Unlike Coriolanus,' this play is full of exquisite poetry, of delicate sentiments, and of the highest kind of eloquence. Among women there are few on record who for beauty of soul and all-absorbing love can be compared with the wife of Brutus, all whose sweetness, tenderness, and truth are brought forth in comparatively few lines by Shakespeare.

History embalms the memory of Brutus and Cassius together, and Tacitus, the greatest of Rome's historians, relates a circumstance belonging to the period of the Empire which shows with what love and reverence the people looked back to these two names long after the republic had perished. When on a festival day the images of illustrious statesmen and warriors were borne in procession through the streets of the city, the Romans, says the historian, gazed far more at the gap where the statues of Brutus and Cassius should have been than at all the rest of the procession put together. The tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra,' which Coleridge thought a formidable rival to Macbeth,' enables Shakespeare to excite sympathy for the worst of the Triumvirs. The character of Antony, with its dash and energy, its recklessness, its licentiousness, its unprincipled extravagance, its puerile servility to a courtesan, was well enough calculated to shine on an unscrupulous stage. He had been made to figure

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successfully in 'Julius Cæsar,' he had neutralised the harangue of Brutus in the forum, and had, indeed, in conjunction with Octavius and Lepidus, blighted the fair fruit of the conspiracy. The friends of freedom, however, being dead, its enemies soon began to put forth their stings against one another; having deluged the streets of Rome with the blood of its noblest citizens, Octavius and Antony gave vent to their mutual jealousy and hatred, which form the subject of this play. In the ancient tragedies, where fate puts forth its hand most visibly, the wicked are not at once checked in their wickedness, but, while chastisement is preparing, run gaily through their allotted cycle. So in Shakespeare, the sanguinary libertine who devoted his hours, as an angry Roman expresses it, to cool a gypsy's lust,' revels on the banks of the Nile as if no sleepless and inexorable antagonist watched his movements from the vantage ground of the Capitol.

Octavius, however, though successful, and contrasting favourably in many respects with Antony, excites in Shakespeare's play as little admiration as in history. The spirit and life of the play are involved in Cleopatra. Pope's fancy about Shakespeare's correct painting of ancient character and manners nowhere meets with a more complete refutation than in this play, for nothing is Roman or Egyptian but the names. Catherine the Second, and Messalina, might as well as any other courtesan have supplied the original of the heroine of this play, who bears but a slight resemblance to the historical Cleopatra. In the amount of ethical delinquency Shakespeare's Egyptian queen may not be more than a match for the real widow of Ptolemy, but in manners there is as little resemblance as between the queen and her cook. The interest of the play consists

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more in the assemblage of ideas, in the strange suggestiveness, in the metaphysical problems, in the subtle superstitions inherent in the human mind, which are inwrought with the adventures of Antony and Cleopatra. In spite of their antecedents, however, they awaken interest and sympathy when, stripped of pomp and station, they draw, as two mere human beings, towards their end. Their vices, and even their crimes, are forgotten; and the shadow of death as it falls over them conceals the sources of our indignation, while it augments the force of our pity.

Another class of Shakespeare's tragedies consists of plays founded on the history of England. Properly speaking, Lear,' 'Cymbeline,' 'Hamlet,' and 'Macbeth' belong to this series, though, like the Greek dramas, they are based on the mythical portion of history. When we pass from Macbeth' to 'King John,' we feel that we have emerged from the poet's own domain, the world of myth and fiction, to a region in which historical truth, if it can be so called, is just sufficient to cramp the genius of the poet without offering any equivalent in a strict adherence to facts. There is no student of Shakespeare, I believe, who does not regret that he should have devoted so much time and pains to these dreary compositions, which, in spite of many brilliant and exciting scenes, defy the patience of all but professional readers; I say professional, because they who undertake to write of Shakespeare must of necessity peruse all he has written-good, bad, or indifferent.

If Shakespeare had any other design in this series than to make money, it must surely have been to show the English people to what worthless individuals the public affairs had been entrusted, from the murderer

of young Arthur of Bretagne down to the assassin of Anne Boleyn. John everybody hates and despises ; much the same thing may be said of Richard the Second. Henry the Fourth is an able but unprincipled tyrant; Henry the Fifth, the best man in this regal procession, gives his name to the worst play; Henry the Sixth, of whom we hear a great deal too much, escapes the fangs of the French she-wolf only to be gored by the boar of York; having from birth till death awakened alternately our contempt and pity, he is murdered by Richard, who 'bustles through his career of crime with jovial recklessness, to make way for the last malefactor in Shakespeare's list, Elizabeth's tyrannical father and Mr. Froude's hero.

How much or how little of these plays Shakespeare himself wrote is matter of no great moment, since they are less to be regarded as poetical works than, to borrow Coleridge's happy phrase, bread and cheese' productions. Yet throughout these historical plays we find a multitude of lines and passages equally remarkable for their imaginative beauty and the wisdom they contain, and it is these incidental portions of the dramas that render the reading of them tolerable, and ensure them a reception by posterity. In Richard the Second,' which opens with the mouthing extravagance of Norfolk and Hereford, we meet with a political passage which, in the minds of Milton and the younger Vane, must have taken rank with Samuel's republican discourse to the Israelites. It is Richard himself who thus speaks:

For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:

How some have been deposed; some slain in war;