It is less creditable to England than honourable to France that a Frenchman should have been the first of Shakespearean students to discover and to prove that the great triad of his Roman plays is not a consecutive work of the same epoch. Until the appearance of Francois- Victor Hugo's incomparable translation, with its elaborate and admirable commentary, it seems to have been the universal and certainly a most natural habit of English criticism to take the three as they usually appear together, in the order of historical chronology, and by tacit implication to assume that they were composed in such order. I should take some shame to myself but that I feel more of grateful pride than of natural shame in the avowal that I at all events owe the first revelation of the truth now so clear and apparent in this matter, to the son of the common lord and master of all poets born in his age--be they liege subjects as loyal as myself or as contumacious as I grieve to find one at least of my elders and betters, whenever I perceive--as too often I cannot choose but perceive--that the voice is the voice of Arnold, but the hand is the hand of Sainte-Beuve. To the honoured and lamented son of our beloved and glorious Master, whom neither I nor any better man can ever praise and thank and glorify enough, belongs all the credit of discerning for himself and discovering for us all the truth that _Julius Caesar_ is at all points equally like the greatest works of Shakespeare's middle period and unlike the works of his last. It is in the main a play belonging to the same order as _King Henry IV_.; but it differs from our English Henriade--as remarkably unlike Voltaire's as _Zaire_ is unlike _Othello_--not more by the absence of Falstaff than by the presence of Brutus. Here at least Shakespeare has made full amends, if not to all modern democrats, yet assuredly to all historical republicans, for any possible or apparent preference of royal to popular traditions. Whatever manner of man may have been the actual Roman, our Shakespearean Brutus is undoubtedly the very noblest figure of a typical and ideal republican in all the literature of the world. "A democracy such as yours in America is my abhorrence," wrote Landor once to an impudent and foul-mouthed Yankee pseudosopher, who had intruded himself on that great man's privacy in order to have the privilege of afterwards informing the readers of a pitiful pamphlet on England that Landor had "pestered him with Southey"; an impertinence, I may add, which Mr. Landor at once rebuked with the sharpest contempt and chastised with the haughtiest courtesy. But, the old friend and lifelong champion of Kossuth went on to say, his feelings were far different towards a republic; and if on the one point, then not less certainly on the other, we may be assured that his convictions and his prepossessions would have been shared by the author of _Coriolanus_ and _Julius Caesar_.