When went there by an age, since the great flood,
But it was fam'd with more than with one man?
When could they say, till now, that talk'd of Rome,
That her wide walks encompass'd but one man? 155
Now is it Rome indeed, and room enough,
When there is in it but one only man.
O, you and I have heard our fathers say
There was a Brutus once that would have brook'd
Th' eternal devil to keep his state in Rome 160
As easily as a king.

[Note 155: /walks/ F4 | Walkes F1 F2 F3 | walls Rowe.]

[Note 135: Observe the force of 'narrow' here; as if Caesar
were grown so enormously big that even the world seemed a
little thing under him. Some while before this, the Senate had
erected a bronze statue of Caesar, standing on a globe, and
inscribed to "Caesar the Demigod," but this inscription Caesar
erased.]

[Note 136: It is only a legend that the bronze Colossus of
Rhodes bestrode the entrance to the famous harbor. The story
probably arose from the statement that the figure, which
represented Helios, the national deity of the Rhodians, was so
high that a ship might sail between its legs.]

[Note 140: In Shakespeare are many such allusions to the
tenets of the old astrology and the belief in planetary
influence upon the fortunes and characters of men which Scott
describes in the Introduction to _Guy Mannering_ and makes the
atmosphere of the story.]

[Note 142: /should be:/ can be. So in _The Tempest_, I, ii,
387: "Where should this music be? i' the air or the earth?"]

[Note 146-147: The allusion is to the old custom of muttering
certain names, supposed to have in them "the might of magic
spells," in raising or conjuring up spirits.]

[Note 152: /the great flood./ By this an ancient Roman would
understand the universal deluge of classical mythology, from
which only Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha escaped alive. The
story is told in Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, I. Shakespeare
mentions Deucalion twice.]

[Note 155: /walks./ The reasons why Rowe's emendation,
'walls,' is almost universally accepted, are that 'walls'
would be easily corrupted into 'walks' from the nearness of
'talk'd,' and that there is a disagreeable assonance in
'talk'd' and 'walks' in successive lines. But 'walks' is
picturesque and poetical; compared with it, 'walls' is
commonplace and obvious. Cf. _Paradise Lost_, IV, 586.]

[Note 156: A play upon 'Rome' and 'room,' which appear to have
been sounded m