, he and Brutus had stood
for the chief praetorship of the city, and Brutus through Caesar's favor
had got the election. And so Shakespeare read in Plutarch that "Cassius,
being a choleric man, and hating Caesar privately more than he did the
tyranny openly, incensed Brutus against him." The effect of this is
finely worked out by the dramatist in the man's affected scorn of
Caesar, and in the scoffing humor in which he loves to speak of him. For
such is the natural language of a masked revenge.

The tone of Cassius is further indicated, and with exquisite art, in his
soliloquy where, after tempering Brutus to his purpose, and finding how
his "honorable metal may be wrought," he gently slurs him for being
practicable to flatteries, and then proceeds to ruminate the scheme for
working upon his vanity, and thereby drawing him into the conspiracy;
thus spilling the significant fact, that his own honor does not stick
to practice the arts by which he thinks it is a shame to be seduced.

It is a noteworthy point also that Cassius is too practical and too much
of a politician to see any ghosts. Acting on far lower principles than
his leader, and such as that leader would spurn as both wicked and base,
he therefore does no violence to his heart in screwing it to the work he
takes in hand; his heart is even more at home in the work than his head;
whereas Brutus, from the wrenching his heart has suffered, keeps
reverting to the moral complexion of his first step. The remembrance of
this is a thorn in his side; while Cassius has no sensibilities of
nature for such compunctions to stick upon. Brutus is never thoroughly
himself after the assassination; that his heart is ill at ease is shown
in a certain dogged tenacity of honor and overstraining of rectitude, as
if he were struggling to make atonement with his conscience. The stab he
gave Caesar planted in his own upright and gentle nature a germ of
remorse, which, gathering strength from every subsequent adversity, came
to embody itself in imaginary sights and sounds; the spirit of justice,
made an ill angel to him by his own sense of wrong, hovering in the
background of his after life, and haunting his solitary moments in the
shape of Caesar's ghost. And so it is well done, that he is made to see
the "monstrous apparition" just after his heart has been pierced through
with many sorrows at hearing of Portia's shocking death.

PORTIA

The delineation of Portia is completed in a