s care which it brings with it.

Shakspeare depicts the popular storms which are wont to accompany a
free constitution in the plots of some of his Roman dramas: of these
Plutarch instead of Holinshed furnishes the basis. He is right in
taking them from a foreign country: for events nearer to his audience
would have roused an interest of a different kind, and yet would not
have had so universal a meaning. What could be more dramatic, for
example, and at the same time more widely applicable than the contrast
between the two speeches, by the first of which Caesar's murder is
justified, while by the second the memory of his services is revived?
The conception of freedom which the first brings to life is set in
opposition to the thought of the virtues and services of the possessor
of absolute power, and thrust by them into the background; but these
same feelings are the deepest and most active in all ages and among
all nations.

But the attested traditions of ancient and modern times do not satisfy
the poet in his wish to lay bare the depths of human existence. He
takes us into the cloudy regions of British and Northern antiquity
only known to fable, in which other contrasts between persons and in
public affairs make their appearance. A king comes on the stage who in
the plenitude of enjoyment and power is brought by overhasty
confidence in his nearest kin to the extremest wretchedness into which
men can fall. We see the heir to a throne who, dispossessed of his
rights by his own mother and his father's murderer, is directed by
mysterious influences to take revenge. We have before us a great
nobleman, who by atrocious murders has gained possession of the
throne, and is slain in fighting for it: the poet brings us into
immediate proximity with the crime, its execution, and its recoil: it
seems like an inspiration of hell and of its deceitful prophecies: we
wander on the confines of the visible world and of that other world
which lies on the other side, but extends over into this, where it
forms the border-land between conscious sense and unconscious madness:
the abysses of the human breast are opened to view, in which men are
chained down and brought to destruction by powers of nature that dwell
there unknown to them: all questions about existence and
non-existence; about heaven, hell, and earth; about freedom and
necessity, are raised in these struggles for the crown. Even the
tenderest feelings that rivet human souls to o