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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!"

Polixenes, again, argues touching the breach of amity between him and Leontes, that revenge is like to be all the more bitter for the cordiality of past confidence. Then, too, the implication of Lord Scroop, of Masham, in the conspiracy with Grey and Cambridge against Henry V.,

"Nay, but the man that was his bedfellow,

Whom he hath cloy'd and graced with princely favours,—
That he should, for a foreign purse, so sell

His sovereign's life to death and treachery!"

Henry reminds Scroop that he bore the key of all his counsels, and knew the very bottom of his soul; and he wept for him,— "for this revolt of thine, methinks, is like another fall of man." -A later king of England, Edward IV., is made to despair when he sees his brother Clarence among the supporters of the foe: "Yea, brother of Clarence, art thou here too? Nay, then, I see that Edward needs must down."-And once again, there is the Et tu Brute cue from which we started, thus set forth in all its suggestive force by Shakespeare's Antony :

"For Brutus, as you know, was Cæsar's angel :
Judge, O you gods, how dearly Cæsar loved him!

This was the most unkindest cut of all:

For when the noble Cæsar saw him stab,

Ingratitude, more strong than traitor's arms,

Quite vanquish'd him : then burst his mighty heart."

But as we recur to this, as the first among these secular annotations on a Scripture text, so we recur to Scripture, in conclusion, for a pathetic parallel, also from the Book of

Psalms: "For it was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it; neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me: then I would have hid myself from him. But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance. We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company." The companionship past intensifies the cruelty present. Without so recent and vivid a remembrance of sweet counsel together, and companionship hallowed by the sanctuary itself, the present cruelty could have been borne; but with them it hardly can.

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"JUDGE NOT.”

ST. MATTHEW vii. 1.

STRINGENT motive is adduced to enforce the strenuous monition, "Judge not,"-and it is, "that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again." There is one Lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy; even He who hath committed all judgment unto the Son: who art thou that judgest another?

Appalled were all who gazed on the last struggles of Cardinal Beaufort, rendered hideous by the tortures of agonizing remorse. Hope had he none. Despair was impersonated in the frenzied contortions of that dying man. King and peers stood beside the death-bed, awe-stricken and shocked. The king prayed for the cardinal, that the Eternal mover of the heavens might "look with a gentle eye upon this wretch:

O beat away the busy meddling fiend

That lays strong siege upon this wretch's soul,
And from his bosom purge this black despair."

See, says a less gentle observer, Warwick, how the pangs of death do make him grin. Royal Henry, on devouter thoughts

intent, bids "peace to his soul," in parting, "if God's pleasure be." And then the monarch solemnly, urgently, importunes the moribund cardinal to give some token, ere he quite depart, that Despair has not made him all her own: "Lord cardinal, if thou think'st on heaven's bliss, hold up thy hand, make signal of thy hope." But the cardinal-dies, and makes no sign. The appeal is fruitless: no hand is held up; no signal of hope displayed. The baffled prince, cut to the heart, can but exclaim, "He dies, and makes no sign: O God, forgive him!" Warwick again interposes a harsher voice, “So bad a death argues a monstrous life," he is sure. But his sovereign hushes his damning criticism with a right royal veto :

"FORBEAR TO JUDGE, for we are sinners all.

*

Close up his eyes, and draw the curtain close;

And let us all to meditation."

Forbear to judge. And the Shakspearean Henry practises in person the monition thus enforced. It is his rule to check

in himself every tendency to uncharitable judgment. As when proof all but positive distresses him of his uncle Gloster's death being due to violence, he yet restrains the bent of his convictions by the prayer,—

"O Thou that judgest all things, stay my thoughts:

My thoughts, that labour to persuade my soul

Some violent hands were laid on Humphrey's life!

If my suspect be false, forgive me, God;

For judgment only doth belong to Thee !"

It is by the deathbed of the man self-convicted of Duke Humphrey's death, that Henry can yet say, even of him, when from so bad a death is argued a monstrous life, Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all.

Are we to infer that Shakspeare was himself for backing to the full this royal veto? That, perhaps, were going too far. The veto is dramatically true to character, and designedly characteristic of the royal speaker. But if Shakspeare himself (we are assuming him to be the author of this disputed play) would or could scarcely in this particular instance have enforced

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such a lesson of charity, we may at least be assured, from the large tolerance and subtle apprehension so patent in his own kingly nature, that he would in spirit have echoed the king's forbear. Perhaps his own feeling might be as nearly as possible expressed in other words of his, put into the mouth of quite another character, and referring to quite another occasion :

"And how his audit stands, who knows, save heaven?

But, in our circumstance and course of thought,

'Tis heavy with him."

Forbear to judge, is, nevertheless, the moral of this strain, as of the other. Human ignorance in the one case, human frailty in the other, ousts human nature from the judgment-seat.

No man, avers Sir Thomas Browne, can justly censure or condemn another; because, in fact, no man truly knows another. "This I perceive in myself; for I am in the dark to all the world, and my nearest friends behold me but in a cloud.

. Further, no man can judge another, because no man knows himself." In a former section of this his profession of faith, this good physician warns those who, upon a rigid application of the law, sentence Solomon unto damnation,* that they condemn not only him, but themselves, and the whole world; "for, by the letter and written word of God, we are without exception in the state of death: but there is a prerogative of God, and an arbitrary pleasure above the letter of His own law, by which alone we can pretend unto salvation, and through which Solomon might be as easily saved as those who condemn him."

The Vicar of Gravenhurst, in his position of parish priest, owns himself compelled to confess that the best people are not the best in every relation of life, and the worst not bad in every relation of life; so that, with experience, he finds himself growing lenient in his blame, if also reticent in his praise. Again and again I say to myself that only the Omniscient can be the equitable judge of human beings-so complicated are our

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* St. Augustine, Lyra, Bellarmine, and others, are chargeable with this judgment and sentence.

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