Being back, I went to see Julius Caesar at NIBLO’S Garden.  It was the day when the French CAESER fell, and the impertinent soothsayer, ROCHEFORT, who had so often advised him to beware, not of the Ides of March, but of the Idees Napoleoniennes, (there is a feeble attempt at a pun here) obtained his liberty, and the right to assail in his newspaper, the virtue of every female relative of the Imperial family.  Of course I know that JULIUS CAESAR was not a Frenchman—­for the modesty of his “Commentaries” is proverbial—­and that SHAKESPEARE never so much as heard of the Man of December.  Nevertheless the two CAESARS were inextricably mixed up in my mind.  I know that two or three editorial persons who sat close by me, were continually talking of NAPOLEON, and I may possibly have confounded their remarks with those of the actors.  Still I could not divest myself of the impression that I was sometimes in Paris and sometimes in Rome, and that the sepulchral voice of Mr. THEODORE HAMILTON, was more often that of NAPOLEON than that of JULIUS.  The play presents itself to my recollection in the following shape.  As I said before, it was represented at the very moment that the French republicans, being satisfied with the bees in their respective bonnets, were obliterating the imperial bees from the doors of the Tuileries, and being anxious to take arms against a sea of Prussians, were taking down the imperial arms wherever they could find them.  Remembering this, the reader will be able to account for any slight difference in text between my Julius Caesar, and that of the respectable and able Mr. SHAKESPEARE.

ACT I.—­Enter various Irish Roman Citizens, flourishing the shillelahs of the period.

1ST. CITIZEN.  “Here’s a row.  Great CAESAR is going to march to Berlin.  Hooray for the Hemperor.”

1ST EDITORIAL PERSON.  “I grant you he was popular when the war began, but to-day the people despise him.”

CASSIUS.  “I hate this CAESAR.  Once he tried to swim across the British Channel with a tame eagle on his shoulder, and couldn’t do it.  When he is sick he takes anti-bilious pills, like any other man.  Obviously he don’t deserve to live.”

CASCA. (Who is fat enough to know better, and not pretend to be discontented.) “Let’s kill him and break all the glass in the windows of Paris.”

BRUTUS.  “My friend, those who live in stone houses should never throw glass about.  I don’t mean anything by this, but it sounds oracular, and will make people think I am a profound philosopher.”

EDITORIAL PERSON.  “What I say is this.  He, CAESAR, governed the Roman rabble vastly better than they deserved.  His only mistakes were, in not sending CASSIUS, who was a sort of ROCHEFORT, without ROCHEFORT’S cowardice, to the galleys, and in not sending BRUTUS as Minister to some capital so dreary that he would have shot himself as soon as he reached his destination.”