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The disfavour of the Court was also increased by his Ode to Brutus, wherein he had extolled the genius of his hero, and praised liberty in language too enthusiastic for the Court of Charles II. The spirit of melancholy claimed Cowley for her own. Disappointment and disgust clouded his heart; ill-health followed, and soon the poor poet breathed his last.
A glittering sword strikes the eyes with some terror, and thunder would not so shock us if its crash only, and not its lightning, was dreaded. Therefore Cicero, with good reason, says in one of his epistles to Brutus: "The eloquence which does not excite admiration, I regard as nothing." Aristotle, too, would have us endeavor to attain this perfection.
The result of the battle was, however, unfortunately for those whose adventures we are now more particularly following, very different in Cassius's part of the field. When Brutus, after completing the conquest of his own immediate foes, returned to his elevated camp, he looked toward the camp of Cassius, and was surprised to find that the tents had disappeared.
On the defeat of the Helvetii, Caesar had planted a colony of them at Gorgobines, near Nevers, on the Loire. These colonists, called Boii, had refused to take part in the rising; and Vercingetorix, turning in contempt from Brutus, had gone off to punish them.
One can imagine a West Indian slave-owner, dealing with negroes through his agent according to the established custom, and yet being a good citizen in England. Cicero, though he suffered from the imperious temper of Brutus, speaks of him as one of those, the sight of whom banished his fears and anxieties for the republic.
People are waiting for the first of January. But Antonius is not waiting for that day, who is now attempting with an army to invade the province of Decimus Brutus, a most illustrious and excellent man. And when he has procured reinforcements and equipments there, he threatens that he will come to this city. What is the use then of waiting, or of even a delay for the very shortest time?
Every one felt that the lofty patriotism and heroic virtues of the old Roman would find a fit representative in Lamar. I remember, in our rehearsals, how completely his identity would be lost in that of Brutus. He seemed to enter into all the feelings and the motives which prompted the great soul of the Roman to slay his friend for his country's good.
It is unnecessary to prolong a painful scene. Brutus ran me up steadily from sum to sum, until his owner said at last: 'Well, we won't 'aggle, sir, call it a hundred. I had to call it a hundred, and what is more, it was a hundred. I took him without a warranty, without even a veterinary opinion.
He likewise wrote several other pieces, spoke a number of good Orations, and was certainly an eminent pleader; so that I much wonder, considering how long he lived, and the character he bore, that he was never preferred to the Consulship. "I really think so," answered Brutus; "and he is almost the only author we have, among the ancients, that I take the trouble to read."
It was while this arrested soldier of the human emancipation sat amid his books and papers, in old Julius Caesar's Tower, or in the Tower of that Conqueror, 'commonly so called, that the 'readers of the wiser sort' found, 'thrown in at their study windows, writings, as if they came 'from several citizens, wherein Caesar's ambition was obscurely glanced at' and thus the whisper of the Roman Brutus 'pieced them out.
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