minal act,
as Cassius persuades Brutus; Iago, Othello. Cassius is a criminal
by instinct. Placed in a social position which removes him from the
temptation to ordinary crime, circumstances combine in his case to bring
out the criminal tendency and give it free play in the projected murder
of Caesar. Sour, envious, unscrupulous, the suggestion to kill Caesar
under the guise of the public weal is in reality a gratification
to Cassius of his own ignoble instincts, and the deliberate
unscrupulousness with which he seeks to corrupt the honourable metal,
seduce the noble mind of his friend, is typical of the man's innate
dishonesty. Cassius belongs to that particular type of the envious
nature which Shakespeare is fond of exemplifying with more or less
degree of villainy in such characters as Iago, Edmund, and Don John,
of which Robert Butler, whose career is given in this book, is a living
instance. Cassius on public grounds tempts Brutus to crime as subtly as
on private grounds Iago tempts Othello, and with something of the same
malicious satisfaction; the soliloquy of Cassius at the end of the
second scene of the first act is that of a bad man and a false friend.
Indeed, the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius after the murder of
Caesar loses much of its sincerity and pathos unless we can forget for
the moment the real character of Cassius. But the interest in the cases
of Cassius and Brutus, Iago and Othello, lies not so much in the
nature of the prompter of the crime. The instances in which an honest,
honourable man is by force of another's suggestion converted into a
criminal are psychologically remarkable. It is to be expected that we
should look in the annals of real crime for confirmation of the truth to
life of stories such as these, told in fiction or drama.

The strongest influence, under which the naturally non-criminal person
may be tempted in violation of instinct and better nature to the
commission of a crime, is that of love or passion. Examples of this kind
are frequent in the annals of crime. There is none more striking than
that of the Widow Gras and Natalis Gaudry. Here a man, brave, honest, of
hitherto irreproachable character, is tempted by a woman to commit the
most cruel and infamous of crimes. At first he repels the suggestion;
at last, when his senses have been excited, his passion inflamed by the
cunning of the woman, as the jealous passion of Othello is played on and
excited by Iago, the patriotism