sentences is a characteristic trait in Brutus, indicating his extravagantly high opinion of his own judgment and his disinclination to be guided by others. See II. i. 184, III. i. 88, IV. ii. 41, iii. 212. Most later editors follow Malone in inserting a comma after "man," retaining the full stop at the end of the line, and changing "was" into "were as to make the verb agree in number with the subject "letters." There is, however, no indication in the account of the incident given by Plutarch that Cassius had any special knowledge of Lucius Pella and his character. (See p. lxxxii.) It is distinctly implied that he was dismissed from his office by Brutus, under whom he was serving, whereas Cassius refused to dismiss "two of his friends, attainted and convicted of the like offences." From this we may infer that Lucius Pella was not one of Cassius' friends.

IV. iii. 182: Nor nothing. This is not the first lie that Brutus is guilty of in the play. But his former lie in II. i. 257 was actuated by an easily intelligible motive, whereas this one is not. Further, in the present case Brutus accepts without protest Messala's admiration, which is based upon a misconception produced by the lie. Most commentators have overlooked the difficulty, and those who have attempted to explain it have not been very successful. Verity suggests that "perhaps Brutus dissembles thus because he cherishes a faint hope that after all Portia is not dead-that the report which reached him was false, and that Messala has later tidings of her being alive." But in what goes before Brutus does not speak as if the information was based on a report that might possibly be false. Mark Hunter, in an ingenious and elaborate examination of the passage, supposes that Brutus's strange denial to Messala was due to his "sensitive shrinking from a wound which is too recent and too painful to be laid bare in the presence of any but the most intimate friends," which is in accordance with the state of Brutus's mind disclosed in lines 157, 165. He therefore tries to "put aside the question," hoping that "Messala does not know the truth, or, knowing it, will not

speak, if he imagines Brutus still ignorant." This view is not easy to reconcile with Brutus's subsequent earnest appeal to Messala to tell all he has heard of Portia, and leaves unexplained the conduct of Cassius, who speaks as if he did not know that Brutus had heard of his wife's death some time before.

My own impression is that the difficulties in the end of this part of the scene are due to additions subsequently made and not perfectly reconciled with the original draft. It is very possible that when Shakespeare first wrote the play his intention was to give an impressive illustration of Brutus's stoicism and subordination of private feelings to public necessities, so that he might rival his supposed ancestor who executed his own sons for treason. Afterwards he may have seen that such a representation of Brutus would be inconsistent with the gentleness previously ascribed to him, and added the lines in which he reveals his loss to Cassius. If this possibility is worth considering, we may conjecture that the additional lines were 143–157, 165. Evidence in favour of this supposition may be derived from the fact that in the scene as it now stands Brutus twice asks for a bowl of wine (see lines 141, 157). Whether it was due to oversight on the part of the poet that lines 180-195 were not omitted or recast so as to be in harmony with the addition, it is idle to inquire. Possibly the original editors may have printed both the original and the added lines, not knowing that the author intended to substitute the latter for the former.

V. i. 101-108: The passage on which this speech is based is correctly rendered by J. and W. Langhorne, as follows:-Brutus answered, "In the younger and less experienced part of my life, I was led, upon philosophical principles, to condemn the conduct of Cato in killing himself. I thought it at once impious and unmanly to sink beneath the stroke of fortune, or to refuse the lot that had befallen us. In my present situation, however, I am of a different opinion." Thus the meaning of Brutus in Plutarch is perfectly clear, namely, that Brutus as a young man entirely condemned suicide, but at the battle of Philippi,

under the stress of circumstances, changed his opinion and determined not to survive defeat. This meaning is obscured or altered by North, in whose translation Brutus's answer begins at the wrong place. He also gives the present tense "trust" instead of the past tense used by Plutarch and Amyot, and so makes Brutus condemn suicide even on the day of battle. (See p. lxxxvi.) Shakespeare, as usual, follows North. He makes his Brutus express to Cassius his condemnation of suicide in his first answer, but when the question of Cassius forces him to realise that unswerving rejection of suicide might end in his being led in triumph through the streets of Rome, he declares warmly that he could never submit to such an indignity. He thus implicitly allows that under certain circumstances he might be compelled to transgress his philosophical principles and commit suicide, although he intends to avoid that necessity by seeking death in battle, if his army is defeated. The admission of an exception to the duty of preserving one's life is in accordance with the doctrines of the Stoics, who approved of suicide when life was found to be no longer worth living. When Brutus disapproved of Cato's suicide, he showed that he was not a Stoic, but a follower of the Old Academy, and, as such, inclined to "lend an ear to Plato, where he says

That men like soldiers must not quit the post
Allotted by the gods."

See Plato's Phado, where Socrates argues that man is not his own property but a possession of the gods, and has no right to make away with that which does not belong to him. In Plutarch we read that Brutus studied and liked every sect and every philosopher, but "above all the rest he loved Plato's sect best." Plato's views upon suicide were probably familiar to Shakespeare, as they are expounded at length in Sidney's Arcadia and in the ninth canto of the first book of the Faerie Queene. With the arguments for and against suicide given in these works we may compare the similar discussion of the subject in Tennyson's Two Voices.

Wright regards "trust" in the rendering of this passage

given in North's Plutarch as "evidently a past tense (Old English, truste)" which "must have been read by Shakespeare as a present."

V. v. 73: the elements] fire, air, earth, and water, the elements of which all things, including the human body, were supposed to be composed. In the animal body the elements determined the humours, fire producing choler, air producing blood, water producing phlegm, and earth producing melancholy. The elements are differently combined in different persons. There was "little of the melancholy element" in Beatrice; the Dauphin's horse was "pure air and fire" (Henry V. III. vii. 22), and “the dull elements of earth and water never appeared in him but only in patient stillness while his rider mounted him"; Cassius was choleric because he had in his temperament too much of the fire which he found wanting in the gentle Brutus (I. ii. 174; and compare IV. iii. III, 112). To produce a perfect disposition, these four elements had to be combined in due proportions, as Antony says they were in Brutus, and as they were combined in Ben Jonson's Crites, "A creature of a most perfect and divine temper; one in whom the humours and elements are peaceably met without emulation of precedency; he is neither too fantastically melancholy, too slowly phlegmatic, too lightly sanguine, and too rashly choleric; but in all so composed and ordered, as it is clear Nature went about some full work, she did more than make a man when she made him." The above passage is quoted by Malone from Cynthia's Revels, a play brought out in 1600, and is probably consciously or unconsciously suggested by Antony's eulogium of Brutus. Another passage which has been pointed out as based on the same model is the following stanza that appeared in the 1603 edition of Drayton's Barons' Wars:

Such one he was, of whom we boldly say,

In whose rich soul all sovereign powers did suit,

In whom in peace the elements all lay

So mixt as none could sovereignty impute;

As all did govern, yet all did obey,

His lively temper was so absolute,

That it seem'd when heaven his model first began
In him it showed perfection in a man.

That this is an imitation of Shakespeare is almost proved by the fact that in the later edition of the Barons' Wars, published in 1619 after Shakespeare's death, the passage was altered so as to follow its original even more closely, and appeared in the following form :

He was a man, then boldly dare to say,

In whose rich soul the virtues well did suit ;
In whom so mix'd the elements all lay,

That none to one could sovereignty impute;
As all did govern, yet did all obey :

He of a temper was so absolute,

As that it seem'd, when Nature him began,
She meant to show that all might be in man.

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