And she says in her defence:
Hé! si j’avois retenu les joyaux
Et quelque part de mes habits royaux,
L’aurois-je fait pour moy, las! malheureuse!
[225] I take it as certain that with Thyreus she is for the moment at least “a boggler,” and then she has already sent her private message to Caesar.
[226] To me the sense seems to be: Supposing the Antony I have depicted never existed, still the conception is too great to be merely my own. It must be an imagination of Nature herself, which she may be unable to embody, but which shames our puny ideals. In other words, Antony is the “form” or “type” which Nature aims at even if she does not attain. I see no reason for changing the “nor” of the first line as it is in the folio to “or.”
[227] Jowett’s Plato, Vol. ii., pages 42-43.
[228] Ibid, pages 56-57.
[229] Le plus grand miracle de l’amour, c’est de guérir de la coquetterie.—La Rochefoucauld.
[230] Cleopatra was actually married to Antony, as has been proved by Professor Ferrero. But Plutarch nowhere else mentions the circumstance, and it contradicts the whole tenor of his narrative.