The world of treason justly might convince.
Let still the states, which flourish for the time,
By subjects be inviolable thought:
And those (no doubt) commit a monstrous crime,
Who lawfull soveraignty prophane in ought:
And we must think (though now thus brought to bow)
The senate, king; a subject Caesar is:
The soveraignty whom violating now
The world must damne, as having done amisse.
Brutus’ motives, which Shakespeare sophisticates, can thus be left him. But does this bit of reasoning, which reads like a passage from the Leviathan, and explains why King James called Alexander “My philosophical poet,” really come nearer the historic truth than the heart-searching of Shakespeare’s Brutus? And does Alexander, taking Brutus’ convictions at second hand and manufacturing an apology for them, do much more to revive the real Brutus, than Shakespeare, whose fervid imagination drives him to realise Brutus’ inmost heart, and who just for that reason