“Quoi! mes plus chers amis! quoi! Cinna! quoi! Maxime! Les deux que j’honorais d’une si haute estime, A qui j’ouvrais mon cœur, et dont j’avais fait choix Pours les plus importants et plus nobles emplois! Après qu’entre leurs mains j’ai remis mon empire, Pour m’arracher le jour l’un et l’autre conspire!” But a later scene proves that Augustus is not even yet aware of all the accomplices; and the conviction of Æmilie as one of them, wrings from him, as Brutus from the elder Cæsar, the upbraiding cry, _Et toi, ma fille, aussi!_ One touching incident marks the horror of the murder of the Czar Paul in 1801. The dress of Ouvaroff, one of the conspirators, is said to have caused him to be mistaken by the Emperor for his son Constantine; and, according to Bignon, the last words which the unhappy monarch uttered were, “And you too, my Constantine!” Very worthless objects have sometimes been very undeservedly Et-tu-Brutefied. The first Lord Holland, when forsaken by the selfish friends, as they have justly been described, with whom he had jobbed and made merry and laughed at principle, had yet retained enough belief in the social virtues to be made seriously unhappy by the conduct of his worthless companions, particularly by that of Rigby, the most worthless of them all; “White-liver’d Grenville and self-loving Gower Shall never cause one peevish moment more; ... Slight was the pain they gave, and short its date; I found I could not both despise and hate; But, Rigby, what did I for thee endure?” A man as pious as Henry Fox was otherwise, has declared that he knew few things which so darken one’s views of the moral government of God, as the experience of baseness and treachery in persons who have won our confidence; that it tempts one to question the reality of human virtue, to suspect the hollowness of all appearance of truth and piety, whence there is but a step to calling in question the moral purpose for which we are placed on earth. Hawthorne somewhere intimates that the young and pure are not apt to find out how actually sin is in the world, until that miserable truth is brought home to them by the guiltiness of some trusted friend. “Trust ye not in a friend,”—but ah, the pity of it, for him who has to take up with these words of the Morasthite,—“A man’s enemies are the men of his own house.”—How many variations on this general theme might be played from Shakespeare’s plays! Sir Valentine, for instance, denouncing the falsity of that other, so-called, but so far mis-called, Gentleman of Verona: ... “Now I dare not say I have one friend alive; thou wouldst disprove me. Who should be trusted now, when one’s right hand Is perjured to the bosom? Proteus, I am sorry I must never trust thee more, But count the world a stranger for thy sake. The private wound is deepest: O time most curst! ’Mongst all foes that a friend should be the worst!”