ect, they did but stab him into a mightier life; so that Brutus might
well say, as indeed he does at last,--

O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet!
Thy spirit walks abroad, and turns our swords
In our own proper entrails. [V, iii, 94-96.]

The Nemesis which asserts itself so sternly in the latter part of the
play may be regarded as a reflex of irony on some of the earlier scenes.
This view infers the disguise of Caesar to be an instance of the
profound guile with which Shakespeare sometimes plays upon his
characters, humoring their bent, and then leaving them to the discipline
of events.

BRUTUS

Coleridge has a shrewd doubt as to what sort of a character Shakespeare
meant his Brutus to be. For, in his thinking aloud just after the
breaking of the conspiracy to him, Brutus avowedly grounds his purpose,
not on anything Caesar has done, nor on what he is, but simply on what
he _may become_ when crowned. He "knows no personal cause to spurn at
him"; nor has he "known when his affections sway'd more than his
reason"; but "he would be crown'd: how that might change his nature,
there's the question"; and,

Since the quarrel
Will bear no colour for the thing he is,
Fashion it thus; that what he is, augmented,
Would run to these and these extremities;
And therefore think him as a serpent's egg
Which, hatch'd, would, as his kind, grow mischievous,
And kill him in the shell. [II, i, 28-34.]

So then Brutus heads a plot to assassinate the man who, besides being
clothed with the sanctions of law as the highest representative of the
state, has been his personal friend and benefactor; all this, too, not
on any ground of fact, but on an assumed probability that the crown will
prove a sacrament of evil, and transform him into quite another man. A
strange piece of casuistry indeed! but nowise unsuited to the spirit of
a man who was to commit the gravest of crimes, purely from a misplaced
virtue.

And yet the character of Brutus is full of beauty and sweetness. In all
the relations of life he is upright, gentle, and pure; of a
sensitiveness and delicacy of principle that cannot bosom the slightest
stain; his mind enriched and fortified with the best extractions of
philosophy; a man adorned with all the virtues which, in public and
private, at home and in the circle of friends, win respect and charm the
heart.

Being such a man, of course he could only do what he did under some sor