No, I rejoyce that thus my strength is knowne;
Since thy distresse strikes deeper in my heart,
Thy griefe (lifes joy!) makes me neglect mine owne.
And Brutus answers:
Thou must (deare love!) that which thou sought’st, receive;
Thy heart so high a saile in stormes still beares,
That thy great courage does deserve to have
Our enterprise entrusted to thine eares.
Here, with the rhetorical amplification which was the chief and almost sole liberty that Alexander allowed himself, Plutarch’s train of thought is more closely followed than by Shakespeare himself. King James’s “philosophical poet” does not even suppress the tribute to education, but rather calls attention to the edifying “sentence” by the expedient less common west of the Channel than among his French masters, of placing it within inverted commas. But, besides lowering the temperature of the whole, he characteristically omits the most important passage, at least in so far as Brutus is concerned, his prayer that “he might be founde a husband, worthie of so noble a wife as Porcia.”
Suppose that a conscientious draughtsman and a painter of genius were moved to reproduce the impression that a group of antique statuary had made on them, using the level surface which alone is at their disposal. The one might choose his station, and set down with all possible precision in his black and white as much as was given him to see. The other taking into account the different conditions of the pictorial and the plastic art, might visualise what seemed to him the inmost meaning to his own mind in his own way, and represent it, the same yet not the same, in all the glory of colour. The former would deliver a version more useful to the historian of sculpture were the original to be lost, but one in which we should miss many beauties of detail, and from which the indwelling spirit would have fled. The latter would not give much help to an antiquarian knowledge of the archetype, but he might transmit its inspiration, and rouse kindred feelings in an even greater degree just because they were mingled with others that came from his own heart.