a

treats Parolles' loss of his drum as 'a disaster of war which Cæsar himself could not have prevented if he had been there to command' (III, vi, 54-56).

The roisterous Pistol, in his magniloquent way, inquires at Dame Quickly, hostess of the Boar's Head, Eastcheap:

Shall pack-horses,
And hollow pampered jades of Asia,
Which cannot go but thirty miles a day,
Compare with Cæsars and with Cannibals (for Hannibals]

And Trojan Greeks?'—2 Henry, IV, II, iv, 176.
And, in a very opposite strain, the deposed Henry VI,
disguised in a forest in the north of England, murmurs :
No bending knee will call thee Cæsar now,
No humble suitors press to thee for right'-3 Henry V., III, i, 18.

There are some very spirited lines in the chorus-prologue of Henry V, in which Shakespeare asks his audience to

'Behold,
In the quick forge and working house of thought,
How London doth pour forth her citizens !
The mayor and all his brethren in best sort,
Like to the senators of the antique Rome,
With the plebeians swarming at their heels,

Go forth and fetch their conquering Cæsar in '-Act V. Pucelle, in i Henry VI, thus refers to Cæsar's words to the master of the pinnace, in which he, disguised as a slave, was striving to make his way from Apollonia to Brundusium, and was compelled, as Plutarch relates (Cæsar, 31), to reveal himself as Cæsar, that he might urge the mariners to make greater exertions:

“Now am I like that proud insulting ship

Which Cæsar and his fortunes bare at once '-1, ii, 139. Lord Bardolph, speaking to old Northumberland of the battle of Shrewsbury, exclaims :

“O, such a day,
So fought, so followed, and so fairly won,
Came not till now to dignify the times,

Since Cæsar's fortunes '-2 Henry IV, I, i, 20-23. In the play of Cymbeline, in which our ancient hist is linked with that of Rome, there are, of course, many references to Julius Cæsar. There is, for instance, the boastful confidence expressed by Posthumus to his friend Philario, in the valour of his compatriot Britons:

Our countrymen
Are men more ordered than when Julius Cæsar
Smiled at their lack of skill, but found their courage
Worthy his frowning at: their discipline-
Now mingled with their courages-will make known
To their approvers, they are people, such

That mend upon the world'-II, iv, 20-26. When Lucius, in Cymbeline's palace, urges the Roman claim to tribute, he states the case thus :

When Julius Cæsar-whose remembrance yet
Lives in men's eyes, and will to ears and tongue;
Be theme and hearing ever-- was in this Britain,
And conquered it, Cassibelan, thine uncle-
Famous in Cæsar's praises, no whit less
That in his feats deserving it—for him,
And his succession, granted Rome a tribute,
Yearly three thousand pounds; which by thee lately

Is left untendered'-111, i, 2-10.
Cloten says :

“There be many Cæsars Ere such another Julius. Britain is

A world by itself; and we will nothing pay'-III, i, 11•14. The queen, taking part in the policy of the court, asserts :

"A kind of conquest
Cæsar made here ; but made not here his brag
Of “came," and "

overcame:" with shame-
The first that ever touched him—he was carried
From off our coast, twice beaten ; and his shipping-
Poor ignorant baubles !-on our terrible seas,
Like egg-shells moved upon their surges, cracked
As easily 'gainst our rocks : for joy whereof
The famed Cassibelan, who was once at point-
O giglot fortune !--to master Cæsar's sword,
Made Lud's town with rejoicing fires bright,

And Britons strut with courage'-III, i, 22-33.
Then Cloten rudely breaks in with his rough words:

Come, there's no more tribute to be paid :
Our kingdom is stronger than it was at that time;
And, as I've said, there is no more such Cæsars :

saw," and "

Other of them may have crooked noses ; but,

To owe such straight arms, none !'~III, i, 34-38. And, after a little more talk, Cymbeline, addressing Lucius, declares:

•You must know,
Till the injurious Romans did extort
This tribute from us, we were free : Cæsar's ambition-
Which swelled so much, that it did almost stretch
The sides o' the world-against all colour, here
Did put the yoke upon us; which to shake off,
Becomes a warlike people, whom we reckon

Ourselves to be'-III, i, 47-54. Not only in the speech given to the queen in Cymbeline, and quoted above, is reference made in Shakespeare's plays to the brief despatch in which Cæsar announced to the senate of Rome his victory over Pharnaces, in the decisive battle of Zela (B.C. 47),‘Veni, vidi, vici.' Sir John Falstaff, after describing to John of Lancaster his capture of Sir John Colville of the Dale, avers : 'He saw me, and yielded ; that I may justly say, with the hook-nosed fellow of Rome, “I came, saw, and overcame (2 Hen. IV, IV, iii, 45). And Rosalind merrily alludes to Cæsar's thrasonical brag, 'I came, saw, and overcame' (V, ii, 29). Lord Say reminds Jack Cade and his co-rioters that

·Kent in the Commentaries Cæsar writ,
Is termed the civilest place in all this isle:
Sweet is the country, because full of riches ;,
The people liberal, valiant, active, wealthy '

—2 Henry VI, IV, vii, 64-67. And so indeed we find Cæsar saying : 'Ex his omnibus longe sunt humanissimi qui Cantium incolunt'—'Of all these, those who dwell in Kent are the most civil and cultured (De Bello Gallico, v, 14).

Our antiquarian historian Stow states that in regard to the building of the Tower of London: 'It hath been the common opinion, and some have written (but of none assured ground), that Julius Cæsar, the first conqueror of the Britons, was the original author, as well thereof as also of many other towers, castles, and great buildings within this realm.' Poetry is the foster-parent of Tradition, and Shakespeare has employed this tradition with excellent effect in the scene in which he brings the queen of Richard II to the model where old (new ?] Troy '-- Troy novant-did stand :

"To Julius Caesar's ill-erected tower,
To whose flint bosom my condemned lord
Is doomed a prisoner by proud Bolingbroke'

- Richard 11, V, i, 2-4; and once again to even better purpose in Richara III when he makes the young Prince Edward say to Buckingham, when his uncle, the Earl of Gloster, gives his counsel that

"Your highness shall repose you at the Tower'-III, i, 65. 'I do not like the Tower, of any place.

Did Julius Cæsar build that place, my lord ?'-III, i, 68, 69. And the conversation thereafter proceeds thus :

‘Buckingham. He did, my gracious lord, begin that place; Which, since, succeeding ages have re-edified.

Prince. Is it upon record, or else reported
Successively from age to age, he built it?

Buck. Upon record, my gracious lord.
Prince. That Julius Cæsar was a famous man;
With what his valour did enrich his wit,
His wit set down to make his valour live :
Death makes no conquest of this conqueror;

For now he lives in fame, though not in life'-—III, i, 70-88. In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare makes Pompey say to the triumvirate near Misenum :

you

all three,
The senators alone of this great world,
Chief factors for the gods, I do not know
Wherefore my father should revengers want,
Having a son and friends; since Julius Cæsar,
Who, at Philippi, the good Brutus ghosted,
There saw you labouring for him. What was't
That moved pale Cassius to conspire; and what
Made the all-honoured honest Roman, Brutus,
With the armed rest, courtiers of beauteous freedom,
To drench the Capitol, but that they would

Have one man but a man?'-II, iv, 8-19.
Reference is made to Cæsar's murder by Suffolk in 2 Henry
VI when the pirates are leading him to death :

Come, soldier, show what cruelty ye can,
That this my death may never be forgot!
Great men oft die by vile Bezonians;
A Roman sworder and banditto slave

Murdered sweet Tully; Brutus' bastard * hand
Stabbed Julius Cæsar; savage islanders
Pompey the Great; and Suffolk dies by pirates'

-IV, i, 132-138. When Prince Edward is killed by Edward, Gloster, and Clarence, Queen Margaret exclaims:

O traitors, murderers !
They that stabbed Cæsar shed no blood at all,
Did not offend, nor were not worthy blame,

If this foul deed were by to sequel it—3 Henry VI, V, V, 2-5. Then of the portents and terrors which preceded Cæsar's murder, besides the fine descriptive recital in this play, we have, in a famous passage in Hamlet, spoken by Horatius, this epitome of the prologue to the omen coming on:'

'In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.
As, stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands,
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse,' etc.

-1, i, 113-120. The Duke of Bedford, while apostrophising his deceased brother, thus refers to the apotheosis t of the murdered conqueror, saying:

'Harry the fifth ! thy ghost I invocate;
Prosper this realm, keep it from civil broils !
Combat with adverse planets in the heavens !
A far more glorious star thy soul will make,

Than Julius Cæsar, or bright-'-i Henry VI, I, i, 52-56. One or two other slight references to the facts of Cæsar's life are also to be found in Antony and Cleopatra, such as the passages in which the heroine boasts:

* This epithet refers to a scandalous story-of which Voltaire unfortunately availed himself in his Julius Cæsar—that Brutus was the son of Cæsar by Servilia, the sister of Cato. That this is a calumny may easily be shown: Julius Cæsar was born 12th July B.C. 100; Brutus was born in the autumn of 85 B.C.

+ In a glowing access of poetic flattery this apotheosis is described, in a passage with which "Shakespeare was surely acquainted, in Ovid's Metamorphoses, xv, 745-870.

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