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waxed very dim, he saw a horrible vision of a man, of a wonderful greatness and dreadful look, which at the first made him marvellously afraid. But when he saw that it did him no hurt, but stood at his bedside and said nothing, at length he asked him what he was. The image answered him, I am thy ill angel, Brutus, and thou shalt see me by the city of Philippi. Then Brutus replied again, and said, Well, I shall see thee then. Therewithal the spirit presently vanished from him.”

It is evident that Shakespeare had both passages in his recollection, though the present scene is chiefly founded upon the first. Plutarch, however, it will be observed, nowhere makes the apparition to have been the ghost of Cæsar.

652. Why, I will see thee. - This is an addition by Shakespeare to the dialogue as given by Plutarch in both lives. And even Plutarch's simple affirmative I shall see thee appears to be converted into an interrogation in 650. It is remarkable that in our next English Plutarch, which passes as having been superintended by Dryden, we have "I will see thee" in both lives. The Greek is, in both passages, merely "Oua (I shall see thee).

652. Boy! Lucius!-Varro! Claudius!- Here again, as in 634, all the Folios, in this and the next line, have Varrus and Claudio. So also in 660.

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660. Sleep again, Lucius, etc. It is hardly necessary to attempt to make verse of this. In the original text Fellow is made to stand as part of the first line.

668. Go, and commend me to my brother Cassius. See 278.

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668. Bid him set on his powers betimes before.The only sense which the expression to set on now

retains is to excite or instigate to make an attack. The other senses which it had in Shakespeare's day may be seen from 27 ("Set on; and leave no ceremony out"); from the passage before us, in which it means to lead forward or set out with; from 713 ("Let them set on at once"); from 745 ("Labeo and Flavius, set our battles on "). — Betimes (meaning early) is commonly supposed to be a corruption of by time, that is, it is said, by the proper time. But this is far from satisfactory. Shakespeare has occasionally betime. [Compare Chaucer (Parson's Tale): "If men be so negligent that they descharge it nought by tyme;" and Rob. de Brunne: "If he bi tyme had gon." These and similar examples seem to confirm the etymology mentioned above. Betimes is found in the Bible, Gen. xxvi. 31; 2 Chron. xxxvi. 15, etc.]

ACT V.

SCENE I. The heading-"Scene I. The plains of Philippi"-is modern, as usual.

670. Their battles are at hand. — Battle is common in our old writers with the sense of a division of an army, or what might now be called a battalion. So again in 673. When employed more precisely the word means the central or main division.

summon.

670. They mean to warn us. - To warn was formerly the common word for what we now call to Persons charged with offences, or against whom complaints were made, were warned to appear to make their answers; members were warned to attend the meetings of the companies or other associations to which they belonged; and in war either of the hostile parties, as here, was said to be

warned when in any way called upon or appealed to by the other. Thus in King John, ii. 1, the citizens of Angiers, making their appearance in answer to the French and English trumpets, exclaim, "Who is it that hath warned us to the walls?" The word, which is connected with ware and wary, is from the Saxon warnian. But the Anglo-Norman dialect of the French has also garner and garnisher with the same meaning.

671. With fearful bravery. - Malone's notion is, that "fearful is used here, as in many other places, in an active sense, -producing fear-intimidating." But the utmost, surely, that Antony can be understood to admit is, that their show of bravery was intended to intimidate. It seems more consonant to the context to take fearful bravery for bravery in show or appearance, which yet is full of real fear or apprehension. Steevens suggests that the expression is probably to be interpreted by the following passage from the Second Book of Sidney's Arcadia: "Her horse, fair and lusty; which she rid so as might show a fearful boldness, daring to do that which she knew that she knew not how to do." The meaning is only so as showed (not so as should show). In like manner a few pages before we have, "But his father had so deeply engraved the suspicion in his heart, that he thought his flight rather to proceed of a fearful guiltiness, than of an humble faithfulness." ["Fearful" in the sense of timorous, faint-hearted, is very common in Old English. See Deut. xx. 8; Judges vii. 3; Isa. xxxv. 4; Matt. viii. 26; Rev. xxi. 8, etc. So in 3 Henry VI. ii. 5, "the fearful flying hare." "Dreadful" is used in the same sense by Chaucer (C. T. 1481): "With dredful foot than stalketh Palamon;" and

(C. T. 11621): "With dredful herte and with ful humble chere." So Gower (Conf. Am. i. p. 247): "Whereof the dredfull hertes tremblen." Wiclif's Bible has "a dreedful herte" in Deut. xxviii. 65. Bravery is here equivalent to bravado. Compare Hamlet, v. 2: "the bravery of his grief;" Othello, i. 1: "Upon malicious bravery."

671. By this face. - By this show or pretence of courage.

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671. To fasten in our thoughts that they have courage. -We have now lost the power of construing to fasten in this way, as if it belonged to the same class of verbs with to think, to believe, to suppose, to imagine, to say, to assert, to affirm, to declare, to swear, to convince, to inform, to remember, to forget, etc., the distinction of which seems to be that they are all significant either of an operation performed by, or at least with the aid of, or of an effect produced upon, the mind.

672. [Their bloody sign of battle, etc.-Compare North's Plutarch: "The next morning by break of day, the signal of battle was set out in Brutus' and Cassius' camp, which was an arming scarlet coat."]

674. Keep thou the left. Ritson remarks "The tenor of the conversation evidently requires us to read you." He means, apparently, that you and your are the words used elsewhere throughout the conversation. But he forgets that the singular pronoun is peculiarly emphatic in this line, as being placed in contrast or opposition to the I. It is true, however, that thou and you were apt to be mistaken for one another in old handwriting from the similarity of the characters used for th and y, which is such that the printers have in many cases been led

to represent the one by the other, giving us, for instance, ye for the, yereof, or y'of, for thereof, etc.

675. Why do you cross me in this exigent? — This is Shakespeare's word for what we now call an exigence, or exigency. Both forms, however, were already in use in his day. Exigent, too, as Nares observes, appears to have then sometimes borne the sense of extremity or end, which is a very slight extension of its proper import of great or extreme pressure. [For an instance of this use of the word, see Henry VI. ii. 5:

These eyes, like lamps whose wasting oil is spent,
Grow dim, as drawing to their exigent.]

677. Drum, etc.-"Lucilius, Titinius, Messala, and Others" is a modern addition to the heading here.

679. Shall we give sign of battle? - We should now say "give signal."

680. We will answer on their charge.

wait till they begin to make their advance.

We will

680. Make forth.—To make, a word which is still used with perhaps as much latitude and variety of application as any other in the language, was, like to do, employed formerly in a number of ways in which it has now ceased to serve us. Nares arranges its obsolete senses under seven heads, no one of which, however, exactly comprehends the sense it bears in the present expression. To make forth is to step forward. What Antony says is addressed, not to the troops, but to Octavius; his meaning is, Let us go forward; the generals — Brutus and Cassius would hold some parley with us.

686. The posture of your blows are yet unknown. - This is the reading of all the old copies. The

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