One such straw was this:  (a foolish one, but it may serve)—­

Rome for centuries has been amusing herself on all public occasions with Fourth of July rhetoric against kings, and in praise of tyrannicides.  Rome for centuries has been cherishing in her heart what she calls a love of Freedom,—­to scourge your slaves, steal from your provincials, and waste your substance in riotous living.  All of which Julius Caesar,—­being a real man, mind you,—­holds in profoundest contempt for driveling unreality; which it certainly is.  But unrealities are awfully real at times.

Unluckily, with all his supermannism, he retained some traces of personality.  He was bald, and sensitive about it; he always had been a trifle foppish.  So when they gave him a nice laurel wreath for his triumph over Pompey, he continued, against all precedent, to wear it indefinitely,—­as hiding certain shining surfaces from the vulgar gaze....  “H’m,” said Rome, “he goes about the next thing to crowned!” And here is his statue, set up with those of the Seven Kings of antiquity; he allowing it, or not protesting.—­They remembered their schoolboy exercises, their spoutings on many Latins for Glorious Fourth; and felt very badly indeed.  Then it was unlucky that, being too intent on realities, he could not bother to rise when those absurd old Piccadilly pterodactyls the Senators came into his presence; that he filled up their ridiculous house promiscuously with low-born soldiers and creatures of his own.  And that there was a crowd of foolish prigs and pedants in Rome to take note of these so trivial things, and to be more irked by them than by all the realities of his power:—­a lean hungry Cassius; an envious brusque detractor Casca; a Brutus with a penchant for being considered a philosopher, after a rather maiden-auntish sort of conception of the part,—­and for being considered a true descendant of his well-known ancestor:  a cold soul much fired with the ignis fatuus of Republican slave-scourging province-fleecing freedom.  An unreal lot, with not the ghost of a Man between them;—­what should the one Great Man of the age find in them to disturb the least ofhis dreams?

Came, however, the Ides of March in B.C. 44; and the laugh once more was with Karma,—­the one great final laugher of the world.  Caesar essayed to be Chief of the Romans:  he who is chief, let him be the bridge;—­this one, because of a few ludicrous personal foibles, has broken down now under the hurry and thunder of the marching cycles.  The fact being that your true Chief aspires only to the bridgehood; whereas this one overlooked that part of it, intent on the chieftaincy.—­And now, God have mercy on us! there is to be all the round of wars and proscriptions and massacres over again:  Roma caput mundi herself piteously decapitate; and with every booby and popinjay rising in turn to kick her about at his pleasure;—­and here first comes Mark Anthony to start the game, it seems.