Abbott, Jacob: History of Julius Caesar. You will find this an interesting life, for it gives a very picturesque account of all the important events in Caesar's career. Botsford, George Willis: Julius Caesar.

This fills the number of The Mentor for March 1, 1918 (volume VI, number 2). It contains many handsome illustrations, several of them showing Rome in Caesar's day. Julius Caesar. This article in the New International Encyclopedia is a very good brief account, giving all of the important facts in the life of the great Roman. Yonge, Charlotte Mary: A Book of Worthies Gathered from the Old Histories, and Now Written Anew. The last "worthy" in the book is Julius Caesar. The account is not very flattering, but it will give you a good notion of life in Rome in Caesar's time and of the conditions he had to meet.

II. HISTORY

Farmer, Lydia Hunt: The Boys' Book of

Famous Rulers. A short, picturesque account of Caesar appears on pages 110-141. MacGregor, Mary: The Story of Rome from the Earliest Times to the Death of Augustus. Julius Caesar is treated on pages 356-412. Morris, Charles: Historical Tales, the Romance of Reality: Roman. Caesar occupies pages

204-226.

a

Plutarch: Lives. Of the many editions very good one is in three volumes in Everyman's Library. In volume II are the very interesting lives of Pompey and Caesar. In volume III are lives of Cato the Younger, Cicero, Antony, Marcus Brutus. The last two are important for the light they throw on Caesar.

Wells, H. G.: The Outline of History, Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind. The whole movement which ended in Julius Caesar is described in chapter XXVIII, which appears in volume I, pp. 493-521.

You will find in these pages many views quite new to you.

III. ROMAN LIFE

Johnston, Harold Whetstone: The Private Life of the Romans. If you wished to produce the play in costume, this book would give you many details of the Roman house and furniture, and of dress and personal ornaments.

IV. FICTION

Davis, William Stearns: A Friend of Caesar. A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time 50-47 B. C. This interesting novel begins at the point where Pompey takes sides with the senate and ends soon after his death. It will make you acquainted with Pompey, Cato, Antony, and other famous men of the time. In reading it you will live through some of the most exciting days in the history of the world. Masefield, John: The Tragedy of Pompey the

Great. After reading Shakespeare, you ought to see how a modern writer treats the same period in history.

V. LIVES OF SHAKESPEARE Mabie, Hamilton Wright: William Shakespeare, Poet, Dramatist, and Man. The many beautiful illustrations in this book give one a good idea of England and London in that day.

Neilson, William A., and Thorndike, Ashley H.: The Facts about Shakespeare. This small volume will give you all the facts that are actually known about Shakespeare, his plays, and the theater in which they were produced. It contains several good bibliographies that will be useful if you wish to study further.

Raleigh, Walter: Shakespeare, in the English Men of Letters Series. One of the best brief lives.

Rolfe, William J.: Shakespeare, the Boy. From this you will gain a very good notion of the conditions in which Shakespeare grew up.

I

At the end of the introduction to the section on Legend and History, page 211, it was pointed out that the selections in that part of the book illustrated some of the ways in which man as an individual has faced, nobly or ignobly, the facts of life. In the epic, for example, you are not conscious of the thoughts and feelings of the ordinary man, or even of his presence, save in the vague way that in battles there must have been masses of individuals who were fighting, not because of any will of their own, but at the command of some king or adventurer. The war before Troy lasted ten years; it was undertaken because the wife of a Greek king was carried off by a Trojan youth. The adventures of Ulysses among the Phæacians, and his story to them of his travels, were the adventures of a brave and fate-driven man. You know that he had companions, and you know the names of some of them, but they are little more than names, and nowhere do you get the idea of a society of men and women engaged in a common task or working out forms of government in which all might share. Aeneas was revered as the founder of the race whence sprang mighty Rome. The Romans, therefore, read the epic that told the story of his adventures, as the Greeks read the story of Troy and of the wanderings of Ulysses, because these stories were the stories of their national heroes. We read them today because of our interest in adventure, or because of the debt we owe to Greece and Rome, or because they were written by poets supremely gifted. But in all three of these great epics, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the main interest is in the deeds

of the heroes, however clearly we realize that into these poems there is also woven much that gives a picture of the ancient classical civilizations. If we consider our own old English epic, Beowulf, we find a similar situation. Beowulf went to the relief of King Hrothgar, whose warriors were being slain by a monster, and his last brave deed was the slaying of the dragon that was bringing death to his own subjects, but the real theme of the poet is the bravery of the hero, the spectacular deeds that brought him fame.

The same thing is true of the romances, whether we read the story of Arthur and the Round Table, or the romances of a modern writer like Sir Walter Scott. The heroes are men of high degree, who go out seeking renown. Often they win this renown through services rendered to others. They are men of high ideals who do great good in the world, but we feel, nevertheless, that it is the hero who counts for most and that the people whom he serves are altogether secondary in the story.

In a heroic drama like Julius Caesar the same thing is true. The main theme is found in the personal ambitions of Caesar, Brutus, and Antony. The mob, by which is meant the mass of common people, is treated with contempt. Shakespeare is not to be blamed for this. In his time few authors wrote about people of low rank. It is true that the reign of Elizabeth owes its greatness in large part to the fact that in her long and peaceful reign wealth increased and every subject, high or low, had better opportunities for decent living than England had known before. Of the "rights" of the people, however, or of the advantage

of allowing them to have a share in their government, we hear nothing.

All this may be summed up by saying that in most of the imaginative literature, ancient and modern, up to and including Shakespeare's time, the common man had small place and the idea of democratic government no place at all. Of course, there are exceptions. Chaucer wrote intimately and with full understanding about very ordinary people as well as about knights and squires, and in his own time, the fourteenth century, one of the greatest of English poems, Piers Plowman, dealt with some of the wrongs and the needs and aspirations of common folk. It is true, also, that the folk ballads dealt with peasants as well as with persons of rank, and that Robin Hood was a sort of champion of all who were oppressed by unjust laws. Still, these exceptions serve only to bring out in clearer relief the fact that the immense mass of epic, heroic poem or romance, and drama constituted a literature of lords and knights and ladies and of their deeds, and that the ideals set forth were those of the man who seeks personal distinction through the spectacular deed.

It was natural that this should be so for two reasons:

In the first place, literature, until quite recently, was written by educated men for people of high position who had both leisure and the necessary training to appreciate it. In ruder times, and always among ruder people, it is true, the minstrel or ballad maker found a hearing, and, as we have seen, ballads were made by men and women who had no book-learning, and were handed down, orally, from generation to generation. But literature as a fine art, carefully composed and written down. to be read, whether in manuscript before the invention of printing in the fifteenth century, or printed by Caxton or some other early printer, found little or no circulation outside what used to be called the upper classes. It was courtly literature. Naturally, its subjects and its heroes were related to courtly life. If peasants appeared in it, they were merely the mob. They could not read. Literature required a reading public. It reflected, therefore, only that public.

The second reason is what may be called political. Until quite recently-to be exact, until well along in the eighteenth century, the common man was not felt to have any special importance. He had small share in government. Even in a nation relatively free, such as England, in which the king had become distinctly subject to the Parliament, the people, in the sense in which we understand the term, were not represented in government. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the series of English Reform Bills beginning in 1832, were required in order to gain for the average man a real share in government. Until the life of common men, therefore, gained importance, their common life found only casual representation in literature. And until masses of men found their power, insisted on free government and free opportunity, one finds the individual hero and his exploits, the life of the man superior by birth and social position, the favorite theme of the greatest literature. Aeneas, wandering with a few companions through the seas from Troy to Carthage and then to Italy, founded Rome. But Walt Whitman, an American poet, writes of the pioneers, masses of them, not led by an Aeneas, but seeking ampler life by their own exertions, and guaranteed by free government the secure possession of what they achieved.

II

Literature, then, is of interest and value only to people who have attained sufficient worldly security and culture to enjoy it and who possess the mental training and leisure that go with such enjoyment. It has always been so. When, for example, France in the twelfth century had built up a civilization of high rank, courtly poets wrote for a courtly society the romances of Arthur and his knights. These were translated into English, or were read, in manuscripts, in the original French. One of the first English printed works was Malory's fine version of the Arthurian romances, printed by William Caxton near the end of the fifteenth century. Similarly, when England at the end of the sixteenth century attained a feeling of national security and prosperity it had