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has made use of Plutarch's lifes of Caesar, of Brutus, and of Antony, following his author in most cases word by word, and expression by expression*).

The period which the fable of our drama comprises in ancient history, is of about two and a half years. The events of the 3 first acts take place in February and March of the year 44, the meeting of the triumvirs falls in the autumn of the year 43, and the two battles near Philippi in autumn 42. Shakspeare, by a remarkable anachronism, has contracted the two battles into one, which in reality are separated from each other by a period of 3 weeks. The celebrated editor Theobald is right in correcting Marullus for Murellus(of all the old Folios) which form must be a mistake, made in printing or transcription; but it is not worth while to change our familiar Portia into Porcia. The only form of the name of Caesar's wife, which was known to antiquity, is Calpurnia, a form that is likewise adopted by North; therefore«Calphurniay, the form of all the old copies, is to be rectified into the original ancient form, as Shakspeare is not likely to have committed such an apparent blunder. Precisely so Decius Brutus must be corrected into Decimus Brutus, if it were not already an error of the Greek Plutarch, produced by Henricus Stephanus in 1572(v rourg éxιοο B005rO l- aAι νs). This Decimus Brutus was the most intimate friend and favourite of Caesar, not Marcus Junius Brutus, the conspirator, as the play exhibits the fact. In this misconception Shakspeare has been followed by the great French dramatist Voltaire in his tragedy on the same subject.

It is very interesting to learn Malone's manner of proceeding in establishing a chro- nological order of Shakspeare's plays by a very significant example he gives in fixing the time in which Shakspeare composed his Julius Caesar**). His reasoning principally grounds on the fact that a rhyming play on the same subject by William Alexander, afterwards Earl of Sterline, has first been printed at London in the year 1607(it has been originally printed in Scotland three years before) which, he thinks, may be presumed to have preceded the Julius Caesar of Shakspeare. Shakspeare, we know, formed at least twelve plays on fables that had been unsuccessfully managed by other poets; but no contemporary writer was daring enough to enter the lists with him in his lifetime, or to model into a drama a subject which had already employed his pen, and it is not likely that Lord Sterline, who was then a very young man, and had scarcely unlearned the Scotch idiom, should have been more hardy than any other poet of that age.) Malone therefore concludes that Shakspeare composed his Julius Caesar later than 1607, or even at this date. But we may with full confidence rely upon Craik when adding: cbut there is nothing to prove that it may not be of considerable earlier date.) The remarkable fact however is that many parallel passages in the two plays in question are found, which have not yet been explained sufficiently.

After having summarily surveyed the external relations of Shakspeare's works in general and of the Julius Caesar in particular, we pass to some metrical observations, or rather, we are now going to give the principles, on which the recent English versification is founded, with special application to Shakspeare.

In this description we refer chiefly to:

*) Compare the edition of Delius who gives in his introduction into the play large extracts to the single scenes from Plutarch, translated by North. **) Compare Aleæx. Schmidt in his: Erklärende Anmerkungen zu Sh. Craik, Prolegomena, page 45 s—. 2