Shakespeare's Julius Caesar Author:William Shakespeare Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: If thou dost nod, thou break's! thy instrument; I'll take it from thee; and, good boy, good night.— Let me see, let me see: is not the leaf turn'd down, Where I ... more »left reading ? Here it is, I think. It is but right to add that, in the war between Pompey and Caesar, Brutus, after much vacillation, sided with the former; and, when Pompey's cause was wrecked at Phar- salia, he was one of the first to throw himself on Caesar's clemency ; who thereupon took him to his bosom ; thus behaving with that mixture of far-sightedness and kind-heartedness which is rightly called magnanimity; and as thinking it nobler to charm the hostility out of his enemies than to make them feel his power. These facts, to be sure, are not brought forward in the play, but the sense of them is ; and this too in a way that tells powerfully against the course of Brutus. Such, to my apprehension, is the Brutus of Shakespeare. But the Brutus of history was neither so immaculate in purpose nor so amiable in temper as the Poet's delineation may lead us to suppose. Merivale, who is among the calmest, fairest, and solidest of English historians, has the following in reference to him : — " He was the son of a father of the same name, who had been a prominent supporter of the Marian party, and finally lost his life by rashly joining in the enterprise of Lepidus. His mother Servilia was half-sister to Marcus Cato, and appears to have been a woman of strong character and more than usual attainments. He was born only fifteen years later than Caesar himself. But Caesar's intimacy with Servilia was, it may be presumed, a principal cause of the marked favour with which he distinguished her offspring. " The elder Brutus being cut off prematurely, when his son was only eight years of age, the care of his education ...« less