ure rushes full upon her; her feelings rise into an
uncontrollable flutter, and run out at every joint and motion of her
body; and nothing can arrest the inward mutiny till affection again
whispers her into composure, lest she say something that may hurt or
endanger her Brutus.

ANTONY

Shakespeare's completed characterization of Antony is in _Antony and
Cleopatra_. In the later play Antony is delineated with his native
aptitudes for vice warmed into full development by the great Egyptian
sorceress. In _Julius Caesar_ Shakespeare emphasizes as one of Antony's
characteristic traits his unreserved adulation of Caesar, shown in
reckless purveying to his dangerous weakness,--the desire to be called a
king. Already Caesar had more than kingly power, and it was the obvious
part of a friend to warn him against this ambition. Here and there are
apt indications of his proneness to those vicious levities and debasing
luxuries which afterwards ripened into such a gigantic profligacy. He
has not yet attained to that rank and full-blown combination of cruelty,
perfidy, and voluptuousness, which the world associates with his name,
but he is plainly on the way to it. His profound and wily dissimulation,
while knitting up the hollow truce with the assassins on the very spot
where "great Caesar fell," is managed with admirable skill; his deep
spasms of grief being worked out in just the right way to quench their
suspicions, and make them run into the toils, when he calls on them to
render him their bloody hands. Nor have they any right to complain, for
he is but paying them in their own coin; and we think none the worse of
him that he fairly outdoes them at their own practice.

But Antony's worst parts as here delivered are his exultant treachery in
proposing to use his colleague Lepidus as at once the pack-horse and the
scape-goat of the Triumvirate, and his remorseless savagery in arranging
for the slaughter of all that was most illustrious in Rome, bartering
away his own uncle, to glut his revenge with the blood of Cicero; though
even here his revenge was less hideous than the cold-blooded policy of
young Octavius. Yet Antony has in the play, as he had in fact, some
right noble streaks in him; for his character was a very mixed one; and
there was to the last a fierce war of good and evil within him.
Especially he had an eye to see, a heart to feel, and a soul to honor
the superb structure of manhood which Rome possessed in Julius