The mirth and high spirit of Beatrice, the humours of Benedick, endear the comedy to every reader, yet the end is "huddled up," like the ends of many of the plays; Claudio is lightly taken back into favour, with Shakespeare's almost limitless tolerance. He can scarcely ever bring himself to punish one of his rogues, such as Lucio and Parolles, and is as clement to the less deserving Claudio. The mirth of "Twelfth Night" might border on the farcical, if Sir Toby, Maria, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and the rest of the light people, were not so delightfully human and living, like their butt, Malvolio; and did not Viola and Olivia lend their exquisite grace. Meanwhile, in "As You Like It," we fleet our time carelessly as they did in the golden world, under the greenwood tree, in the enchanted company of Rosalind, Touchstone, the greatest of Shakespeare's clowns, and the melancholy and humorous Jaques, the contemplator. Returning to historical drama, and using North's translation of Plutarch as his material, fusing North's prose into blank verse, he now produced "Julius Cæsar," in which the chief personages are Brutus, Marcus Antonius, and the Roman populace. Brutus appears as the virtuous and irresolute man, slave to a pedantic conscience which pushes him on to the slaying of great Cæsar. All readers note Shakespeare's way of placing a man of nature more or less noble, but irresolute, in a crisis which demands decision. Hamlet, Brutus, and Macbeth are the great examples. It does not follow that Shakespeare himself was irresolute, and that, when he thought of a man who is obliged to take a constant part, he felt that, had he been that man, he would have wavered. He simply, chose to illustrate that tragedy of a soul. Where would be the interest in a play of Hamlet had the prince gone straight to his mark and slain the king "at sight"? There would have been no play! How could we endure a Brutus who, in his relations with Cæsar, mobbed and stabbed the greatest of mortals, in a forthright business manner, with no hesitations? If there were not enough of nobility in Macbeth to unman him, he would be a vulgar usurper. When he chose, Shakespeare could design men as true to their single aim as Richard III and Iago. Tragedy requires in the chief sufferer, as the Greeks saw, greatness with a fatal blemish; this idea runs through their poetry from Achilles to the Aias and Œdipus of Sophocles. The purpose of Brutus, a deed, to reverse his own words, "to make whole men sick," when in contemplation, would not let him eat, nor talk, nor sleep; but, once resolved, his heart is steeled, nor does the ghost of Cæsar fright him, as the spectres of his fancy appal Macbeth. The other great character is the fickle Roman crowd, played on by the rhetoric of Antony. Shakespeare was not hostile to the people, but the mob he knew, and drew it relentlessly again and again.