ACT II.—­Enter BRUTUS and fellow radicals.

BRUTUS.  “I have no complaint against CAESAR, and I therefore gladly join your noble band of assassins.  We will kill him and establish a provisional government with myself at its head.  CAESAR is ambitious, and I hate ambition.  All I want is to be the ruler of Rome.”

CASSIUS.  “Come, my brave fellows.  Haste to the stabbing.  Away!  Away!”

EDITORIAL PERSON.  “What a farce is history.  Here are PUMBLECHOOK, BRUTUS and JOHN WILKES CASSIUS held up as models of excellence and integrity.  What did they and their fellow scoundrels do after they had killed CAESAR, but desolate their country with civil war?”

ACT III.—­Enter ASSASSINS headed by BRUTUS and GAMBETTA, CASSIUS and ROCHEFORT.

CASSIUS.  “Here is CAESAR with his back toward us, fighting the German’s hordes.  Let us steal up and stab him before he can help himself.” (They stab him.)

CASSIUS.  “Now we will kick his wife out of Paris and smash his furniture.  We will all become a Provisional Government, and fix everything to suit ourselves.  I will revive my newspaper, and hire a staff from the New York Sun, who will make it more scurrilous than ever.”

Enter the Parisian populace crying, “Hooray for CAESAR.”

CASSIUS.  “Hush.  CAESAR is dead, and we are going to proclaim a republic.  Begin and abuse him with all your might.  We’ll let you smash some windows presently.”

POPULACE.  “Hooray.  The tyrant has fallen.  Let’s go and insult his wife and smash everything generally.”

1ST EDITORIAL PERSON.  “Yesterday these precious rascals voted for him.  To-day they insult him—­it being safe to do so—­and to-morrow they will want him back again.”

2ND EDITORIAL PERSON, “There lies the ruins of the noblest nephew of his uncle that ever lived in France or elsewhere.  He was unscrupulous, I admit, but he knew how to rule.  Shall we stay and hear MARK ANTONY praise him, and set the fickle rabble at the throats of ROCHEFORT and BRUTUS, and their gang?”

1ST EDITORIAL PERSON.  “That will take place very shortly, but I can’t wait for it.  I must go home to write an editorial welcoming the new republic, and prophesying all manner of success for it.  The American people like that sort of trash, though they have already twice seen the French try republican institutions only to make a muddle of them.”

2ND EDITORIAL PERSON.  “What do you think of the actors here at NIBLO’S.”

1ST EDITORIAL PERSON.  “DAVENPORT is good but heavy, BARRETT rants like a raving French radical.  MONTGOMERY is excellent, and the rest are so so.”

And the undersigned having seen the French revolution played on the Roman stage at NIBLO’S, also went home without waiting to see the prophetic fourth and fifth acts, in which the conspirators come to grief, and the empire is reestablished.  We shall read all about it in the cable dispatches a few months hence.  Good Heavens! who can listen calmly to the speeches of the players, while the grandest drama of the century is acting across the sea, where a mad populace, freed from the firm grasp of its master, breaks windows and howls itself hoarse as the best preparations for holding the fairest of cities against the resistless veterans of VON MOLTKE.