The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch,
That hurts, and is desired.

To him, as to the dying husband of Octavia, this creature of his own hand might have boasted herself that the loveliest and purest among all her sisters of his begetting,

            with her modest eyes
   And still conclusion, shall acquire no honour,
   Demurring upon me.

To sum up, Shakespeare has elsewhere given us in ideal incarnation the perfect mother, the perfect wife, the perfect daughter, the perfect mistress, or the perfect maiden:  here only once for all he has given us the perfect and the everlasting woman.

And what a world of great men and great things, “high actions and high passions,” is this that he has spread under her for a footcloth or hung behind her for a curtain!  The descendant of that other his ancestral Alcides, late offshoot of the god whom he loved and who so long was loth to leave him, is here as in history the visible one man revealed who could grapple for a second with very Rome and seem to throw it, more lightly than he could cope with Cleopatra.  And not the Roman Landor himself could see or make us see more clearly than has his fellow provincial of Warwickshire that first imperial nephew of her great first paramour, who was to his actual uncle even such a foil and counterfeit and perverse and prosperous parody as the son of Hortense Beauharnais of Saint-Leu to the son of Letizia Buonaparte of Ajaccio.  For Shakespeare too, like Landor, had watched his “sweet Octavius” smilingly and frowningly “draw under nose the knuckle of forefinger” as he looked out upon the trail of innocent blood after the bright receding figure of his brave young kinsman.  The fair-faced false “present God” of his poetic parasites, the smooth triumphant patron and preserver with the heart of ice and iron, smiles before us to the very life.  It is of no account now to remember that

         he at Philippi kept
   His sword even like a dancer: 

for the sword of Antony that struck for him is in the renegade hand of Dercetas.

I have said nothing of Enobarbus or of Eros, the fugitive once ruined by his flight and again redeemed by the death-agony of his dark and doomed repentance, or the freedman transfigured by a death more fair than freedom through the glory of the greatness of his faith:  for who can speak of all things or of half that are in Shakespeare?  And who can speak worthily of any?

I am come now to that strange part of a task too high for me, where I must needs speak not only (as may indeed well be) unworthily, but also (as may well seem) unlovingly, of some certain portions in the mature and authentic work of Shakespeare.  “Though it be honest, it is never good” to do so:  yet here I cannot choose but speak plainly after my own poor conscience, and risk all chances of chastisement as fearful as any once threatened for her too faithful messenger by the heart-stricken wrath of Cleopatra.