Caesar,
who stood to him, indeed, as a kind of superior nature, to raise him
above himself. He "fear'd Caesar, honour'd him, and lov'd him"; and with
the murdered Caesar for his theme, he was for once inspired and kindled
to a rapture of the truest, noblest, most overwhelming eloquence.
Noteworthy also is the grateful remembrance at last of his obligations
to Brutus for having saved him from the daggers of the conspirators.

THE PEOPLE

That many-headed, but withal big-souled creature, the multitude, is
charmingly characterized in _Julius Caesar_. The common people, it is
true, are rather easily swayed hither and thither by the contagion of
sympathy and of persuasive speech; yet their feelings are in the main
right, and even their judgment in the long run is better than that of
the pampered Roman aristocracy, inasmuch as it proceeds more from the
instincts of manhood. Shakespeare evidently loved to play with the
natural, unsophisticated, though somewhat childish heart of the people;
but his playing is always genial and human-hearted, with a certain
angelic humor in it that seldom fails to warm us towards the subject. On
the whole, he understood the people well, and they have well repaid him
in understanding him better than the critics have often done. The
cobbler's droll humor, at the opening of this play, followed as it is by
a strain of the loftiest poetry, is aptly noted by Campbell as showing
that the dramatist, "even in dealing with classical subjects, laughed at
the classic fear of putting the ludicrous and sublime into
juxtaposition."

IX. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS

As a whole, _Julius Caesar_ is inferior to _Coriolanus_, but it abounds
in scenes and passages fraught, with the highest virtue of Shakespeare's
genius. Among these may be specially mentioned the second scene of the
first act, where Cassius sows the seed of the conspiracy in Brutus's
mind, warmed with such a wrappage of instigation as to assure its
effective germination; also the first scene of the second act,
unfolding the birth of the conspiracy, and winding up with the
interview, so charged with domestic glory, of Brutus and Portia. The
oration of Antony in Caesar's funeral is such an interfusion of art and
passion as realizes the very perfection of its kind. Adapted at once to
the comprehension of the lowest mind and to the delectation of the
highest, and running its pathos into the very quick of them that hear
it, it tells with terrible e