But we may previse that he was rash in his marriage bargain, that Maria, Lady Belch, will bring him up with a round turn, that he will find himself coming in "earlier o' nights" in future.

And who could ever be angry with Sir Andrew? He is perfect fool, complete coward, and gull. But picture his face when his adored and trusted Sir Toby tells him that truth. And how charming he is! And what manners! His "good Mistress Mary Accost" and, with a bow to that benighted old swashbuckler, his

And yet I will not compare with an old man.

And when Sir Toby-his tiny, mischievous Maria having kissed her hand to him and away-puffs his old chest and pulls his moustache with

She's a beagle, true bred, and one that adores me; what o' that?

who can resist the pathos of

I was adored once, too!

Sir Andrew was a fool, but Sir Andrew was a gentleman.

Nor is there any need to speak of the verse. Open the play where we will, of itself almost it sings to us. It is Shakespeare at his most melodious. And it is tinged throughout with a pathos which gives, to the play-one hazards—a charm that the robuster As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing lack. Whether it be Orsino's beginning

If music be the food of love, play on

or Viola's

or Olivia's

Make me a willow cabin at your door

O world! how apt the poor are to be proud

or any one of fifty other passages that could be found, they all have this peculiar beauty, which Shakespeare never quite hit on again, though he did greater things. And the immortal:

A blank, my lord, she never told her love
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek; she pin'd in thought
And with a green and yellow melancholy

She sat, like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief.

One may dogmatise a little about that. It has the almost indescribable quality-some magic of sense and sound and vision, all three blending into a clairvoyance—which even the greatest poets achieve but once in a while.

"Julius Cæsar"

§ 5

Julius Cæsar is a play of power. It is a fine play. Had Shakespeare written it and then written no more, he could still have been called the best dramatist of his time. But it has a further interest for us in that it is a prologue to work that lets us call him (though hyperbole is poor appreciation) the greatest dramatist the world has ever seen. What intimate workings of his nature were involved in the change is idle guessing. But in Julius Cæsar the student may add to the playgoer's enjoyment the noting of the things that mark it as the spring-board from which the leap was taken to Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra.

The play seems to us in some ways more "modern" than most of its fellows. We are not Elizabethan-minded enough to get the full flavour of the Comedies, and the matter of the Histories is strange matter to us as it was not to Shakespeare-no such gap of understanding divided him as divides us from Bosworth and Agincourt. But he sees the Romans much as we may. And in this we may mark his genius, and mark too the genesis

gave

him an horizon which he never leshis heroes' spirits move in larger spaces. hat Shakespeare, who took ideas from 's he would have been damned as a plalearn the essential thing but from him. It might seem strange, if we did not arning.

been always open to him, and Roman uarry for his fellow playwrights, he had >t in it himself. But not till the theme dly would he bestir himself. But then

The play rises in one sweep to a heroic der-and he holds it there. He is writrectness of the later Histories. Cassius Hotspur, but he is far from Hotspur.

ll what you and other men

is life; but for my single self

ef not be as live to be

uch a thing as I myself.

free as Cæsar; so were you.

oing from another world. Shakespeare aybe; but he makes it ring true. And

n about me that are fat:

en and such as sleep o' nights:
as a lean and hungry look;
much; such men are dangerous.

t and on through Casca's scene. There elder tone of disillusion staved off by

mockery, but of courage too under the burdens of the mind, different, how far, from hopes and fears in which Henry IV and V lived and moved.

And so throughout the play. Its keynotes are such things as Portia's scene with Brutus:

And Cæsar's

I grant I am a woman, but withal

A woman that Lord Brutus took to wife.
I grant I am a woman, but withal

A woman well-reputed, Cato's daughter.
Think you I am no stronger than my sex
Being so father'd and so husbanded?

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.

As Antony's

O mighty Cæsar, dost thou lie so low,
Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils,
Shrunk to this little measure? . . .

As Brutus' reproach to the reckless Cassius:

What! shall one of us

That struck the foremost man of all this world
But for supporting robbers, shall we now
Contaminate our fingers with base bribes

And sell the mighty space of our large honours
For so much trash as may be grasped thus?

And as the closing

This was the noblest Roman of them all.