ward, manly speech in prose, and
the gist of the matter was that he did what he did (killed Caesar),
not because he loved Caesar less, but because he loved Rome more. And I
believe he told the simple honest truth.

Then he acts as Antony's chairman, or introducer, in a manly
straightforward manner, and then he goes off and leaves the stage to
him, which is another generous act; though it was lucky for Brutus, as
it happened afterwards, that he was out of the way.

Mark Antony gets all the limelight and blank verse. He had the "gift of
the gab" all right. Old Cassius referred to it later on in one of those
"words-before-blows" barneys they had on the battlefield where they hurt
each other a damned sight more with their tongues than they did with
their swords afterwards.

We've all heard of Antony's speech:

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

Which was a lie to start with.

The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones.

Which is not so true in these days of newspapers and magazines. And so
on. He says that Brutus and his friends are honourable men about nine
times in his short speech. Now, was Mark Antony an honourable man?

And then the flap-doodle about dead Caesar's wounds, and their poor dumb
mouths, and the people kissing them, and dipping their handkerchiefs in
his sacred blood. All worthy of our Purves trying to pump tears out of a
jury.

But it fetched the crowd; it always did, it always has done, it always
does, and it always will do. And the hint of Caesar's will, and the
open abuse of Brutus and Co. when he saw that he was safe, and the cheap
anti-climax of the reading of the will. Nothing in this line can be too
cheap for the crowd, as witness the melodramas of our own civilized and
enlightened times.

Antony was a noble Purves.

And the mob rushed off to burn houses, as it has always done, and will
always do when it gets a chance--it tried to burn mine more than once.

The quarrel scene between Brutus and Cassius is one of the best scenes
in Shakespeare. It is great from the sublime to the ridiculous--you must
read it for yourself. It seems that Brutus objected to Cassius's, or one
of his off-side friends' methods of raising the wind--he reckoned it
was one of the very things they killed Julius Caesar for; and Cassius,
loving Brutus more than a brother, is very much hurt about it. I can't
make out what the trouble really was about