t
of delusion. And so indeed it is. Yet this very delusion serves,
apparently, to ennoble and beautify him, as it takes him and works upon
him through his virtues. At heart he is a real patriot, every inch of
him. But his patriotism, besides being somewhat hidebound with
patrician pride, is of the speculative kind, and dwells, where his whole
character has been chiefly formed, in a world of poetical and
philosophic ideals. He is an enthusiastic student of books. Plato is his
favorite teacher; and he has studiously framed his life and tuned his
thoughts to the grand and pure conceptions won from that all but divine
source: Plato's genius walks with him in the Senate, sits with him at
the fireside, goes with him to the wars, and still hovers about his
tent.

His great fault, then, lies in supposing it his duty to be meddling with
things that he does not understand. Conscious of high thoughts and just
desires, but with no gift of practical insight, he is ill fitted to
"grind among the iron facts of life." In truth, he does not really see
where he is; the actual circumstances and tendencies amidst which he
lives are as a book written in a language he cannot read. The characters
of those who act with him are too far below the region of his principles
and habitual thinkings for him to take the true cast of them. Himself
incapable of such motives as govern them, he just projects and suspends
his ideals in them, and then misreckons upon them as realizing the men
of his own brain. So also he clings to the idea of the great and free
republic of his fathers, the old Rome that has ever stood to his
feelings touched with the consecrations of time and glorified with the
high virtues that have grown up under her cherishing. But, in the long
reign of tearing faction and civil butchery, that which he worships has
been substantially changed, the reality lost. Caesar, already clothed
with the title and the power of Imperator for life, would change the
form so as to agree with the substance, the name so as to fit the thing.
But Brutus is so filled with the idea of that which has thus passed
away never to return that he thinks to save or recover the whole by
preventing such formal and nominal change.

And so his whole course is that of one acting on his own ideas, not on
the facts that are before and around him. Indeed, he does not _see_
them; he merely dreams his own meaning into them. He is swift to do that
by which he thinks his countr