m to the condition
of blindness in which the woman-drunken staggers. It is a part of all
drunkenness that the drunkard thinks himself a king, though he looks and
is a sot. Shakespeare's marvellous illustration of this blindness (in
the third act) is seldom praised as it should be. Antony, crushingly
defeated, owing to the treachery of all debauched natures, calls upon
Octavius to meet him in single combat.

"men's judgments are
A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward
Do draw the inward quality after them,
To suffer all alike."

"when we in our viciousness grow hard,
O misery on't--the wise gods seel our eyes;
In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us
Adore our errors; laugh at's while we strut
To our confusion."

The cruel bungling suicide which leaves him lingering in dishonour is
one of the saddest things in the plays. This was Antony who ruled once,
this mutterer dying, whom no one loves enough to kill. Once before, in
Shakespeare's vision, he came near death, in the proud scene in the
senate house, before Caesar's murderers. He was very great and noble
then. Now

"The star is fall'n
And time is at his period."

"The god Hercules, whom Antony loved,"

has moved away with his hautboys and all comes to dust again.

The minds of most writers would have been exhausted after the creation
of four such acts. The splendour of Shakespeare's intellectual energy
makes the last act as bright a torch of beauty as the others. The cry--

"We'll bury him; and then, what's brave, what's noble,
Let's do it after the high Roman fashion,
And make Death proud to take us ...
.... we have no friend
But resolution and the briefest end,"

begins a song of the welcoming of death, unlike anything in the plays.
Shakespeare seldom allows a woman a great, tragical scene. Cleopatra is
the only Shakespearean woman who dies heroically upon the stage. Her
death scene is not the greatest, nor the most terrible, but it is the
most beautiful scene in all the tragedies. The words--

"Finish, good lady; the bright day is done,
And we are for the dark,"

and those most marvellous words, written at one golden time, in a gush
of the spirit, when the man must have been trembling--

"O eastern star!
Peace, peace!
Dost thou not see my baby at my brea