I thought to crush him in an equal force, True sword to sword; I'll potch at him some way, My valor (poison'd With only suffering stain by him) for him Shall fly out of itself: nor sleep, nor sanctuary, Being naked, sick, nor fane, nor capitol, The prayers of priests, nor times of sacrifices, Their rotten privilege and custom 'gainst I have such deep faith in Shakspeare's heart-lore, that I take for granted that this is in nature, and not as a mere anomaly; although I can not in myself discover any germ of possible feeling, which could wax and unfold itself into such sentiment as this. However, I perceive that in this speech is meant to be contained a prevention of shock at the after-change in Aufidius' character. Act ii. sc. 1. Speech of Menenius: The most sovereign prescription in Galen, &c. Was it without, or in contempt of, historical information that Shakspeare made the contemporaries of Coriolanus quote Cato and Galen? I can not decide to my own satisfaction. Ib. sc. 3. Speech of Coriolanus :— Why in this wolvish gown should I stand here If That the gown of the candidate was of whitened wool, we know. Does wolvish' or woolvish' mean 'made of wool?' it means wolfish,' what is the sense? Act iv. sc. 7. Speech of Aufidius: All places yield to him ere he sits down, &c. I have always thought this, in itself so beautiful speech, the least explicable from the mood and full intention of the speaker of any in the whole works of Shakspeare. I cherish the hope that I am mistaken, and that, becoming wiser, I shall discover some profound excellence in that, in which I now appear to detect an imperfection. JULIUS CAESAR. Act i. sc. 1. Mar. What meanest thou by that? Mend me, thou saucy fellow! THE speeches of Flavius and Marullus are in blank verse. Wherever regular metre can be rendered truly imitative of character, passion, or personal rank, Shakspeare seldom, if ever, neglects it. Hence this line should be read: :- What mean'st by that? mend me, thou saucy fellow ! I say regular metre for even the prose has in the highest and lowest dramatic personage, a Cobbler or a Hamlet, a rhythm so felicitous and so severally appropriate, as to be a virtual metre. Ib. sc. 2. Bru. A soothsayer bids you beware the Ides of March. If my ear does not deceive me, the metre of this line was meant to express that sort of mild philosophic contempt, characterizing Brutus even in his first casual speech. The line is a trimeter, each dipodia containing two accented and two unaccented syllables, but variously arranged, as thus :— A soothsayer bids you beware the Ides of March. Ib. Speech of Brutus :— text. Set honor in one eye, and death i' the other, Warburton would read' death' for both;' but I prefer the old There are here three things, the public good, the individual Brutus' honor, and his death. The latter two so balanced each other, that he could decide for the first by equipoise; nay-the thought growing-that honor had more weight than death. That Cassius understood it as Warburton, is the beauty of Cassius as contrasted with Brutus. Ib. Cæsar's speech : He loves no plays, As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music, &c. This is not a trivial observation, nor does our poet mean barely by it, that Cassius was not a merry, sprightly man; but that he had not a due temperament of harmony in his disposition. Theobald's Note. O Theobald what a commentator wast thou, when thou wouldst affect to understand Shakspeare, instead of contenting thyself with collating the text! The meaning here is too deep for a line ten-fold the length of thine to fathom. Ib. sc. 3. Cæsar's speech: Be factious for redress of all these griefs; As who goes farthest. I understand it thus: You have spoken as a conspirator; be so in fact, and I will join yon. Act on your principles, and real ize them in a fact.' Act ii. sc. 1. Speech of Brutus : 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. And, to speak truth of Cæsar, I have not known when his affections sway'd This speech is singular ;-at least, I do not at present see into Shakspeare's motive, his rationale, or in what point of view he meant Brutus' character to appear. For surely-(this, I mean, is what I say to myself, with my present quantum of insight, only modified by my experience in how many instances I have ripened into a perception of beauties, where I had before descried faults)-surely, nothing can seem more discordant with our historical preconceptions of Brutus, or more lowering to the intellect of the Stoico-Platonic tyrannicide, than the tenets here attributed to him—to him, the stern Roman republican; namely,—that he would have no objection to a king, or to Cæsar, a monarch in Rome, would Cæsar but be as good a monarch as he now seems disposed to be! How, too, could Brutus say that he found no personal cause-none in Cæsar's past conduct as a man? Had he not passed the Rubicon? Had he not entered Rome as a conqueror? Had he not placed his Gauls in the Senate? ?-Shakspeare, it may be said, has not brought these things forwardTrue; and this is just the ground of my perplexity. What character did Shakspeare mean his Brutus to be? Ib. Speech of Brutus :— For if thou path thy native semblance on Surely, there need be no scruple in treating this 'path' as a mere misprint or mis-script for put.' In what place does Shakspeare,-where does any other writer of the same age-use 'path' as a verb for 'walk?' (r) Ib. sc. 2. Cæsar's speech :— She dreamt last night she saw my statue No doubt, it should be statua, as in the same age, they more often pronounced heroes' as a trisyllable than dissyllable. A modern tragic poet would have written, Last night she dreamt, that she my statue saw— But Shakspeare never avails himself of the supposed license of transposition, merely for the metre. There is always some logic either of thought or passion to justify it. Act iii. sc. 1. Antony's speech : Pardon me, Julius-here wast thou bay'd, brave hart; I doubt the genuineness of the last two lines;-not because they are vile; but first, on account of the rhythm, which is not Shaksperian, but just the very tune of some old play, from which the actor might have interpolated them; and secondly, because they interrupt, not only the sense and connection, but likewise the flow both of the passion, and (what is with me still more decisive) of the Shaksperian link of association. As with many another parenthesis or gloss slipt into the text, we have only to read the passage without it, to see that it never was in it. I venture to say there is no instance in Shakspeare fairly like this. Conceits he has; but they not only rise out of some word in the lines before, but also lead to the thought in the lines following. Here the conceit is a mere alien: Antony forgets an image, when he is even touching it, and then recollects it, when the thought last in his mind must have led him away from it. Act iv. sc. 3. Speech of Brutus : What, shall one of us, That struck the foremost man of all this world, But for supporting robbers. This seemingly strange assertion of Brutus is unhappily verified in the present day. What is an immense army, in which the lust of plunder has quenched all the duties of the citizen, other than a horde of robbers, or differenced only as fiends are from ordinarily reprobate men? Cæsar supported, and was supported by, such as these; and even so Bonaparte in our days. I know no part of Shakspeare that more impresses on me the belief of his genius being superhuman, than this scene between Brutus and Cassius. In the Gnostic heresy it might have been credited with less absurdity than most of their dogmas, that the Supreme had employed him to create, previously to his function of representing, characters. ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA. SHAKSPEARE can be complimented only by comparison with himself: all other eulogies are either heterogeneous, as when they are in reference to Spenser or Milton; or they are flat truisms, as when he is gravely preferred to Corneille, Racine, or even hist own immediate successors, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger and the rest. The highest praise, or rather form of praise, of this play, which I can offer in my own mind, is the doubt which the perusal always occasions in me, whether the Antony and Cleopatra is not, in all exhibitions of a giant power in its strength and vigor of maturity, a formidable rival of Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet, and Othello. Feliciter audax is the motto for its style comparatively with that of Shakspeare's other works, even as it is the general motto of all his works compared with those of other poets. Be it remembered, too, that this happy valiancy of style is but the representative and result of all the material excellences so expressed. This play should be perused in mental contrast with Romeo and Juliet ;-as the love of passion and appetite opposed to the love of affection and instinct. But the art displayed in the char |