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Brutus and Cassius had published a decree of the Senate, calling all the Senators, and especially the Consulares, to Rome. There was reason to suppose that Antony was willing to relax his pretensions. They had strenuously demanded his attendance, and whispers were heard that he had fled from the difficulties of the times.
Brutus, instead of Valerius, whom he would have preferred, had as a colleague Tarquinius Collatinus, the husband of Lucretia, who was not a better man than Valerius, but was elected because the men in power at Rome, seeing what intrigues the exiled king was setting on foot to secure his return, wished to have for their general a man who was his sworn personal enemy.
Brutus and Calvus have been before noticed as the advocates of the dry sententious mode of speaking, which they dignified by the name of Attic; a kind of eloquence which seems to have been popular from the comparative facility with which it was attained. In the Ciceronian age the general character of the oratory was dignified and graceful.
He then got a fresh wafer and sealed the pamphlets up again. "There," said he, you keep dark and sell the first flat you come across the same way the varmint sold you. brutus, sickened at heart by the peddler's iniquity, revived at the prospect of selling some fellow-creature as he had been sold.
"In truth, Pomponius," he says, "I remember it right well, for then it was that I heard Deiotarus, that truest and best of kings, defended by our Brutus here," Deiotarus was that Eastern king whose defence by Cicero himself I have mentioned when speaking of his pleadings before Cæsar. Then he rushes off into his subject, and discusses at length his favorite idea.
In "Julius Caesar" he wanted to play Brutus. "That's the part for the actor," he said, "because it needs acting. But the actor-manager's part is Antony Antony scores all along the line. Now when the actor and actor-manager fight in a play, and when there is no part for you in it, I think it's wiser to leave it alone." Every one knows when the luck first began to turn against Henry Irving.
With the left hand he covered his eyes, that he might not witness the horrible spectacle. Brutus, rushed upon the point of the weapon with such fatal force that he fell and immediately expired.
But besides the two obvious advantages of surveying, as it were in a picture, the true beauty of virtue and deformity of vice, we may moreover learn from Plutarch, Nepos, Suetonius, and other biographers, this useful lesson, not too hastily, nor in the gross, to bestow either our praise or censure; since we shall often find such a mixture of good and evil in the same character that it may require a very accurate judgment and a very elaborate inquiry to determine on which side the balance turns, for though we sometimes meet with an Aristides or a Brutus, a Lysander or a Nero, yet far the greater number are of the mixt kind, neither totally good nor bad; their greatest virtues being obscured and allayed by their vices, and those again softened and coloured over by their virtues.
"Sir," I said in a voice that sounded strangely discordant, "I told him he lied." "Ha!" said my father, and for a moment I thought he was going to commend my act, but instead his eyes moved to the table. "Brutus," he continued, "is my mind becoming cloudy, or is it true the wine is running low? Open another bottle, Brutus." There was a silence while he raised his glass to his lips.
She retires to the solitude of her loved chamber window, and reads of Aristides the Just, of Themistocles with his Spartan virtues, of Brutus, and of the mother of the Gracchi. Greece and Rome rise before her in all their ancient renown.
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