ors; he had continued it,
long after he had ceased to cherish any hope of victory.
But now the struggle itself had become impossible; the republic
which Marcus Brutus had founded was dead and never to be revived;
what were the republicans now to do on the earth? The treasure
was carried off, the sentinels were thereby relieved; who could
blame them if they departed? There was more nobility, and above all
more judgment, in the death of Cato than there had been in his life.
Cato was anything but a great man; but with all that short-sightedness,
that perversity, that dry prolixity, and those spurious phrases
which have stamped him, for his own and for all time,
as the ideal of unreflecting republicanism and the favourite of all
who make it their hobby, he was yet the only man who honourably
and courageously championed in the last struggle the great system
doomed to destruction. Just because the shrewdest lie feels itself
inwardly annihilated before the simple truth, and because
all the dignity and glory of human nature ultimately depend
not on shrewdness but on honesty, Cato has played a greater part
in history than many men far superior to him in intellect.
It only heightens the deep and tragic significance of his death
that he was himself a fool; in truth it is just because Don Quixote
is a fool that he is a tragic figure. It is an affecting fact,
that on that world-stage, on which so many great and wise men
had moved and acted, the fool was destined to give the epilogue.
He too died not in vain. It was a fearfully striking protest
of the republic against the monarchy, that the last republican went
as the first monarch came--a protest which tore asunder like gossamer
all that so-called constitutional character with which Caesar
invested his monarchy, and exposed in all its hypocritical falsehood
the shibboleth of the reconciliation of all parties, under the aegis
of which despotism grew up. The unrelenting warfare which the ghost
of the legitimate republic waged for centuries, from Cassius
and Brutus down to Thrasea and Tacitus, nay, even far later,
against the Caesarian monarchy--a warfare of plots and of literature--
was the legacy which the dying Cato bequeathed to his enemies.
This republican opposition derived from Cato its whole attitude--
stately, transcendental in its rhetoric, pretentiously rigid,
hopeless, and faithful to death; and accordingly it began
even immediately after his death to revere as a sai