w have plucked out their own, to set a crown upon his
head. Such is the natural result, when the intensities of admiration and
compassion meet together in the human breast.

From all which it may well be thought that Caesar was too great for the
hero of a drama, since his greatness, if brought forward in full
measure, would leave no room for anything else, at least would preclude
any proper dramatic balance and equipoise. It was only as a sort of
underlying potency, or a force withdrawn into the background, that his
presence was compatible with that harmony and reciprocity of several
characters which a well-ordered drama requires. At all events, it is
pretty clear that, where he was, such figures as Brutus and Cassius
could never be very considerable, save as his assassins. They would not
have been heard of in after times, if they had not "struck the foremost
man of all this world"; in other words, the great sun of Rome had to be
shorn of his beams, else so ineffectual a fire as Brutus could nowise
catch the eye.

Be this as it may, there is no doubt that Shakespeare knew the whole
height and compass of Caesar's vast and varied capacity. It may be
regretted that he did not render him as he evidently saw him, inasmuch
as he alone, perhaps, of all the men who ever wrote could have given an
adequate expression of that colossal man.

It is possible that the policy of the drama may have been to represent
Caesar not as he was indeed, but as he must have appeared to the
conspirators; to make us see him as they saw him, in order that they too
might have fair and equal judgment at our hands. For Caesar was
literally too great to be seen by them, save as children often see
bugbears by moonlight, when their inexperienced eyes are mocked with
air. And Shakespeare may well have judged that the best way to set us
right towards them was by identifying us more or less with them in
mental position, and making us share somewhat in their delusion. For
there is scarce anything wherein we are so apt to err as in reference to
the characters of men, when time has settled and cleared up the
questions in which they lost their way: we blame them for not having
seen as we see; while in truth the things that are so bathed in light to
us were full of darkness to them, and we should have understood them
better, had we been in the dark along with them.

Caesar, indeed, was not bewildered by the political questions of his
time; but all the rest we