the nobler Brutus opposes it, in the following words:

1

No, not an oath. If not the face of men *,
The fufferance of our fouls, the times abuse,
If these be motives weak, break off betimes,
And ev'ry man hence to his idle bed;
So let high-fighted tyranny range on,
'Till each man drop by lottery-But if these,
As I am fure they do, bear fire enough
To kindle cowards, and to steel with valour
The melting spirits of women; then, countrymen,
What need we any spur, but our own cause,
To prick us to redress? What other bond,
Than fecret Romans that have spoke the word,
And will not palter + ? And what other oath,
Than honesty to honesty engaged,
That this shall be, or we will fall for it?
Swear priests, and cowards, and men cautelous,
Old feeble carrions, and such suffering fouls
That welcome wrongs. Unto bad causes swear
Such creatures as men doubt, but do not stain
The even virtue of our enterprize,
Nor th' insuppressive mettle of our spirits,
To think that or our cause, or our performance,
Did need an oath; when every drop of blood,
That ev'ry Roman bears, and nobly bears,
Is guilty of a several bastardy,
If he doth break the smallest particle
Of any promise that hath past from him.

Cicero is then proposed to be added to their league,

and for the following good and prudent reason :
Metellus Cimber. O let us have him, for his silver hairs
Will purchase us a good opinion,
And buy men's voices to commend our deeds-
It shall be said his judgment ruled our hands;
Our youth and wildness shall no whit appear,
But all be buried in his gravity.

But he is objected to, on account of a fort of character, which is not uncommon in life, and is justly descriptive also of the person to whom it is applied, who, though certainly a very great man,

The face of men, either the dejected looks of the people, or their count tenance and approbation of the measure. † Topalter, to shift, or shuffle.

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was, notwithstanding, a vain and self-opinionated one likewife.

Brutus. O name him not; let us not break with him *;
For he will never follow any thing
That other men begin.

Afterwards, when Cassius urges the expediency of involving Antony in the fame doom with Cæfar, Brutus very nobly refuses to concur, upon the following reafons:

Our course will feem too bloody, Caius Caffius,
To cut the head off, and then hack the limbs,
Like wrath in death, and envy + afterwards;
For Antony is but a limb of Cæfar,
And in the spirit of man there is no blood.
Oh, that we then could come by Cæfar's spirit,
And not difmember Cæfar ! But, alas!
Cæfar must bleed for it-And, gentle friends,
Let's kill him boldly, but not wrathfully;
Let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods,
Not hew him as a carcase fit for bounds;
And let our hearts, as fubtle masters do,
Stir up their fervants to an act of rage,
And after seem to chide them 1. This shall make
Our purpose necessary, and not envious;
Which so appearing to the common eyes,
We shall be deemed purgers, not murderers.

It were much to be wished, for the fake both of decency and humanity, that fuch a fentiment as this, was the spirit of laws relative to all capital punishments.-Breaking on the wheel, empaling, and other foreign penalties of death, are horrible even to thought; and what must they be to the view! Even our own code, though reckoned milder than our neighbours, is hardly less barbarous; in the instances of quartering, burning, and pressing to death, if executed, according to the full rigour of the fentence. But the hangman, it seems, has more

* Impart the secret to bim. † Envy, for malice. I This paffage is very obfcure, and the Commentators, according to their fual supinenefs, have left it unnoticed. The meaning may be this-Let us impute the act to our paffions instigated by our fears, and then appear to lament the - violence of their proceedings.

humanity humanity than the legislature, as he is said always to render the criminal senseless, before he proceeds to the severity of the statute. He first kills the fpirit, the demon of the law, and then only executes the dead letter of it.

There is a sentiment upon this subject, in a late writing, which I think may very properly be quoted here. " I would have all laws mild, but executed " with the utmost strictness; so that justice and " humanity may go hand in hand together. I am " not for severe executions; for when the penalty "exceeds the offence, it is not the criminal, but " buman nature that fuffers. Death alone is suffi"cient to remove the offender *."

But methinks this argument might be urged still further in favour of clemency-Suppose we should reason thus: "All laws are a mutual compact of

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society entered into with itself. The Many can "confide to the Few those rights only, which they respectively possess in themselves. To confer a power of death, then, should feem to imply a "right of fuicide." I declare myself unable to detect any manner of fophiftry, in such a fyllogifm.

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SCENE IV.

Cafar. Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never tafte 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 wil' come,

The philofophy of death is well enough argued here, according to the old Stoical doctrine of fate, or predeftination, This should seem to be a good notion for a mere foldier; but yet we do not find, in the late carnage*, that it rendered the Turks braver, who believe in it, than it did the Ruffians, who do not.

Series of Letters between Henry and Frances.

+ The war between the Czarina and the Porte,

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ACT

ACT III. SCENE I.

Cæfar speaks a sentence here, which shews him to have been worthy of a better fate.

When Artemidorus, upon seeing the number of papers presented to him on his march to the capital,

cries out,

O, Cæfar, read mine first; for mine's a fuit,
That touches Cæfar nearer-Read it, great Cæfar

he replies, in the true spirit of a prince,
What touches us ourself, shall be last served.

And afterwards, when Metellus Cimber pleads for the repeal of his brother's banishment, he answers him with the proper steadiness of a person intrusted with the executive province of a legislature,

I must prevent thee, Cimber-
These couchings and these lowly curtefies
Might ftir * the blood of ordinary men,
And turn pre-ordinance and first decree
Into the law + of children. Be not fond I
To think that Cæfar bears such rebel blood,
That will be thawed from the true quality,
With that which melteth fools; I mean Iweet words,
Low crooked curtefies, and base spaniel-fawning
Thy brother by decree is banished;

If thou dost bend, and pray, and fawn, for him,
I spurn thee, like a cur, out of my way-
Know Cæfar doth not wrong; nor without cause
Will he be fatisfied.

I cannot help thinking, that the Poet has not given either Cæfar fair play for his life, or Brutus for his character, in bringing on the affaffination fo immediately after the one has uttered, and the other heard, the two foregoing speeches.

The last sentence above was not necessary to be quoted, for the purpose of the speech, merely, as far as it had been specified in the note which pre

cedes it; but I confess that I was anxious to produce it, in order to take an opportunity of vindicating our Author from an abfurdity of expreffion, which has been so disingenuously imputed to him by his rival, Ben Johnson, who charges him with having wrote that passage thus:

" Cæfar never did wrong, but with just cause."

Now, O rare Ben Johnson*, what manner of foundation could'st thou have for fuch a farcafm, except in the envious malice of thine own nature ? for the very copy from which the present text is taken, was published in thine own life-time.

Or, suppose that the line had really stood as Johnson has pretended to have quoted it, might not any candid critic, who was at all versed in the latitude of expreffion generally made use of by Shakespeare, have fufficiently obviated the contradiction in the terms, by only conftruing the word wrong, into the sense of injury? for a penalty is certainly an injury †, though not a wrong.

I hope my Reader will not think this note to be any manner of interruption to the general tenor of these remarks, as he must acknowledge that there is a proper moral in defending the Author of this great code of Ethics, from any aspersion thrown out against his sense, meaning, or character.

In the last passage of this Scene, the two principal patriots, Brutus and Caffius, shew a noble spirit, in not endeavouring to support themselves after the deed by faction, in the common fenfe of the word, trusting solely to the justice and policy they had prefumed in the act itself, for their security and defence.

* The epithet by which he is characterised on his tomb. † In the sense of burt, or detriment.

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Camus,