her subject nations; reforms and improvements of every kind are advancing; learning and art spring into fresh life under the fostering care of the ruler; the sky is clear,—but, alas! how soon is the thunderbolt to fall!
Cæsar has reached the summit of human greatness; what more can he desire? He would embody his ideas in an institution, that they may become permanent; he would bind the kingly diadem upon the brow already wreathed with the laurels of the imperator, and add to military strength and popular favor "the divinity that doth hedge a king."
Herein, in the popular belief, lurks Cæsar's one weakness; here lies the opportunity for the motive of the drama, his ruin and death; for "the Senate and the people," who have alike brooked "the eternal devil" of misrule and bloodshed "to keep his state in Rome," will not endure the name of king.
There is much truth, it seems to me, in the suggestion of an eminent critic that Shakespeare would have us see Cæsar first with the eyes of the conspirators and their dupes; that he wishes to hide his greatness, and exaggerate his alleged weakness, or we should be unable to enter into the spirit of the two leaders, Brutus and Cassius, or help regarding them as the purely base and vulgar murderers that all their fellows are. Had their victim trodden the stage in the full splendor of his powers, we could not have endured his death, or borne for one moment with his assassins; forgive them we never can. But the feeling conveyed by the boastful words and arrogant bearing of Cæsar is not suffered to be a lasting one; for a moment we see him with the envious eyes of Cassius and the undiscerning eyes of Brutus, but it is only a moment's glimpse.
In the splendid lines which speak his scorn of death, in spite of the omens and prodigies by which Nature and soothsayers seek to warn him of his coming doom, he declares that—
"Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come."
