re, and therefore he seemed so to them; and
while their own heads were swimming they naturally ascribed his seeming
bewilderment to a dangerous intoxication. As for his marvelous career of
success, they attributed this mainly to his good luck, such being the
common refuge of inferior minds when they would escape the sense of
their inferiority. Hence, as generally happens with the highest order of
men, his greatness had to wait the approval of later events. He indeed,
far beyond any other man of his age, "looked into the seeds of time";
but this was not, and could not be known, till time had developed those
seeds into their fruits. Why then may not Shakespeare's idea have been
so to order things that the full strength of the man should not appear
in the play, as it did not in fact, till after his fall? This view will
both explain and justify the strange disguise--a sort of falsetto
greatness--under which Caesar exhibits himself.

Now the seeming contradiction between Caesar as known and Caesar as
rendered by Shakespeare is what, more than anything else, perplexes.
But a very refined, subtile, and peculiar irony pervades this, more than
any other of Shakespeare's plays; not intended as such, indeed, by the
speakers, but a sort of historic irony,--the irony of Providence, so to
speak, or, if you please, of Fate; much the same as is implied in the
proverb, "A haughty spirit goeth before a fall." This irony crops out in
many places. Thus we have Caesar most blown with arrogance and godding
it in the loftiest style when the daggers of the assassins are on the
very point of leaping at him. So too, all along, we find Brutus most
confident in those very things where he is most at fault, or acting like
a man "most ignorant of what he's most assured"; as when he says that
"Antony can do no more than Caesar's arm when Caesar's head is off."
This, to be sure, is not meant ironically by him, but it is turned into
irony by the fact that Antony soon tears the cause of the conspirators
all to pieces with his tongue. But, indeed, this sort of honest guile
runs all through the piece as a perfusive and permeating efficacy. A
still better instance of it occurs just after the murder, when the
chiefs of the conspiracy are exulting in the transcendent virtue and
beneficence of their deed, and in its future stage celebrity; and
Cassius says,--

So often shall the knot of us be call'd
The men that gave their country liberty. [III, i, 118-11