at the moment when Brutus was hiding in his bosom the news of Portia's death, his admiration completely disarms his resentment.

"I have as much of this in art as you,

But yet my nature could not bear it so."

As time wears on, Cassius's nature seems to harden, it is the Roman within him that comes more and more to the front; but with Brutus it is otherwise. He becomes more lovable than he was. A touch of tenderness comes over his character which brings into clearer contrast the mask of stoicism which he wore. His delicate and thoughtful care for his little page-boy and his guards are designed to bring out this trait, and to place in stronger relief the real inconsistency of the man who, tender as he was, could be persuaded by political sophistry to plunge his dagger to the hilt in the heart of his dearest friend. An atmosphere of absolute hopelessness lowers over the republican camp. The appearance to Brutus of his evil spirit is but on a par with the surroundings. Even the eagles which for a time perched on the standards gave place to carrion-crows and kites as the day of battle approached. It is a fight against the inevitable.

Arrived at Philippi, mistake and misfortune still go hand in hand. An interview (Act v. Scene 1) forced on by Brutus between the leaders only leads to Brutus's hearing for the first time the common-sense view of the murder. As Antony puts it :—

"Villains, you did not so, when your vile daggers

Hacked one another in the sides of Cæsar :

You showed your teeth like apes, and fawned like hounds,
And bowed like bondmen, kissing Cæsar's feet;

While damned Casca, like a cur, behind,

Struck Cæsar on the neck. O you flatterers !"

In the battle itself, as if to show that fate, not skill, was fighting against them, Cassius, the better soldier, is beaten (Act v. Scene 3), while Brutus, the philosopher, is successful; but to render even this success fatal, Cassius in mistake commits suicide, and in a second contest (Act v. Scene 4) Brutus himself is defeated, and dies by his own hand (Scene 5). Even in death the feeling of a lost cause is uppermost in their minds. Cassius's last words, "Cæsar, thou art revenged, even with the sword that killed thee," and Brutus's, "Cæsar, now be still; I killed not thee with half so good a will," tell the same story of hopeless failure. It is this which gives its pathetic air to the close of the play. Brutus and Cassius, the two leaders, are alone. Casca, Trebonius, Decius, Cimber, never reappear after the murder; as if Shakespeare wished to purge away all the coarser parts from the conspiracy, and to display to us its best elements as those on which the final punishment fell. For Cassius and Brutus are in their ends noble. Like Romans, they die without repining. Mistaken as they are, they are greater than Antony, the time-serving politician. The beauty of Brutus's character increases even to the last. He was at his worst when he decided to slay Cæsar. During and after the conspiracy,

even his mistakes serve to illustrate the nobleness of his character. As a politician he was a failure. As a soldier he cannot compare with either Antony or Cassius. But simply as a man, no one can fail to recognise the beauty of the character which the old republican world of Rome had brought forth. Though despised by them as a practical politician, both Antony and Cassius amply recognise his merits as a man, and we feel the appropriateness of the politician and soldier who had foiled him being chosen to pronounce his panegyric.

"This was the noblest Roman of them all :
All the conspirators, save only he,

Did that they did in envy of great Cæsar;
He only, in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made one of them.
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.'"

If we may venture to ask what was the political idea which runs through Julius Caesar, I confess it seems somewhat pessimistic, though in Shakespeare's time it was not a bad moral to preach, and there were those among Shakespeare's friends to whom a lesson in the uselessness of conspiracies might not be without its value. It is this: "Every nation has as good a government as it deserves." If the nation is sound, so will be its rulers; if corrupt, then corruption will bear sway. The murder of one ruler will merely change the person;

infallibly it will not better the character of the ruled. It is only by changing the character of the rank and file of the nation that any improvement can be effected in its political institutions. In his days this was no barren lesson for England. The rule of the last of the Tudors and the first of the Stuarts might not be all that was ideal, but it was not by Essex conspiracies, Main and Bye plots, or the horrible designs of Catesby, Digby, and Fawkes, that it could be ameliorated. The men who were the real reformers of his day were the Puritan preachers, who were training up the generation which curbed the royal power, and set on foot the movement which within a century made England the freest, most enlightened, and most tolerant country in Europe and in the world.

MACBETH

PART I

WHAT is the impression which Shakespeare, in the first scene, wishes to make upon his audience? In Hamlet it was a feeling of insecurity, in Julius Caesar the fickleness of the Roman mob, here it is probably the presence of the supernatural. Shakespeare calls upon us to prepare for a plot in which the supernatural is to supply the motive force, and in which the leading character, Macbeth, is to be the protégé of an unseen world of violence.

Scene 2, on the other hand, gives us the characteristics of mundane Scotland. These are violence and treachery. Macdonwald's open insurrection, Cawdor's secret treachery, the Norwegian invasion, give us in a couple of pages the life of Scotland of Macbeth's day; and the first question of the audience is, "Who is the king of such a distracted country?" Shakespeare is ready with his answer. It is the gentle Duncan, whose function in a struggle which had like to have cost his