ost of his generals dead or fled. He implores
Strato to assist him to suicide, and says:

_"I pray thee, Strato, stay thou by thy lord;
Thou art a fellow of good respect;
Thy life hath had some smack of honor in it;
Hold then my sword, and turn away thy face,
While I do run upon it!
Farewell, good Strato; Caesar now be still,
I killed not thee with half so good a will!"_
(Runs on his sword and dies.)

Antony and Octavius and his army soon find Brutus slain by his own sword,
and with a most magnificent and undeserved generosity Antony pronounces
this benediction over the dead body of the vilest and most intelligent
conspirator who ever lived!

_"This was the noblest Roman of them all;
All the conspirators, save only he
Did that they did in envy of great Caesar;
He only in a general honest thought,
And common good to all made one of them.
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mixed in him that Nature might stand up,
And say to all the world, This was a man!"_

The whole audience, led by Southampton, Essex, Bacon and Drayton gave three
cheers and a lion roar for "Julius Caesar," the greatest historical and
classical play ever composed, and destined to run down the ages for a
million years!

CHAPTER XIII.

TWO TRAMPS. BY LAND AND SEA.

_"Travelers must be content."_

_"Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety."_

The translation of Petrarch, Plutarch, Tacitus, Terence, and particularly
Homer, by Chapman, gave a great impulse to dramatic writers, and inspired a
feverish desire to travel through classic lands where classic authors lived
and died.

Shakspere was a natural bohemian, and while he could conform to the
conventionalities of society, he was never more pleased than when mixing
with the variegated mass of mankind, where vice and virtue predominated
without the guilt of hypocrisy to blur and blast the principles of
sincerity.

Art, fashion and human laws he knew to be often only blinds for the
concealment of plastic iniquity, and were secretly purchased by the few who
had the gold to buy.

By sinking the grappling iron of independent investigation into every form
and phase of human life, he plucked from the deepest ocean of adversity
the rarest shells, weeds and flowers of thought, and spread them before the
world as a new revelation.

By mingling with and knowing the good and bad, he s