Act iii. sc. 1. Antony's speech:—
Pardon me, Julius—here wast thou bay'd, brave hart;
Here didst thou fall, and here thy hunters stand
Sign'd in thy spoil, and crimson'd in thy death.
O world! thou wast the forest to this hart,
And this, indeed, O world! the heart of thee.
I doubt the genuineness of the last two lines;—not because they are vile; but first, on account of the rhythm, which is not Shakspearian, but just the very tune of some old play, from which the actor might have interpolated them;—and secondly, because they interrupt, not only the sense and connection, but likewise the flow both of the passion, and, (what is with me still more decisive) of the Shakspearian link of association. As with many another parenthesis or gloss slipt into the text, we have only to read the passage without it, to see that it never was in it. I venture to say there is no instance in Shakspeare fairly like this. Conceits he has; but they not only rise out of some word in the lines before, but also lead to the thought in the lines following. Here the conceit is a mere alien: Antony forgets an image, when he is even touching it, and then recollects it, when the thought last in his mind must have led him away from it.
Act iv. sc. 3. Speech of Brutus:—
——What, shall one of us,
That struck the foremost man of all this world,
But for supporting robbers.
This seemingly strange assertion of Brutus is unhappily verified in the present day. What is an immense army, in which the lust of plunder has quenched all the duties of the citizen, other than a horde of robbers, or differenced only as fiends are from ordinarily reprobate men? Caesar supported, and was supported by, such as these;—and even so Buonaparte in our days.
I know no part of Shakspeare that more impresses on me the belief of his genius being superhuman, than this scene between Brutus and Cassius. In the Gnostic heresy, it might have been credited with less absurdity than most of their dogmas, that the Supreme had employed him to create, previously to his function of representing, characters.