Page:Julius Caesar (1919) Yale.djvu/121

Julius Cæsar be straightened out if we punctuate 'lamb,—' and interpret 'That' as 'With one that, with a man who,' thus: 'O Cassius, you are associated with a mere lamb,—with a man whose anger is as negative and latent as the fire in a flint, which needs a hard blow before showing any flame at all and even then yields only a momentary spark.'

grief. The grammatical construction breaks down here (though the sense is clear enough), unless we (1) construe 'grief with 'impatient of in the preceding line, thus: 'Unable to endure my absence and her own sorrow over Antony's success'; or (2) read 'grieved' for 'grief,' thus: 'Impatient and grieved, in this situation she fell distract,' etc.

Nothing, Messala. Various more or less plausible attempts have been made to defend Brutus from this most unpleasant appearance of deceiving Messala in order to win applause for his fortitude under affliction, but the best way out of the difficulty lies in accepting the suggestion of J. Resch that tvo alternative versions of Brutus' stoical conduct have been accidentally taken over into the Folio text from the MS. or prompt-book copy.

three-and-thirty. According to North's Plutarch the number of Caesar's wounds was three-and-twenty, and several editors have followed Theobald in making the somewhat meticulous correction.

In these lines Brutus has been charged by many critics with flatly contradicting his declaration against suicide in lines 101-108; but the inconsistency disappears if the significance of lines 113, 114 be grasped (by a proper interpretation of 'Must') as merely restating the stoical fatalism of lines 106-108, for Brutus really says simply this: 'No, Cassius, you are an Epicurean and do not understand, and I cannot take the time now to explain