Cassius: Cicero one!
Messala: Cicero is dead.
Poor Brutus! His heart had cause to be sick of many griefs that day.
Messala thinks he has news to break, and Brutus draws him out. How
many and many a man and woman, with a lump in the throat, have
broken sad and bad news since that day, and started out to do it in
the same old gentle way:
Messala: Had you your letters from your wife, my lord?
Brutus: No, Messala.
Messala: Nor nothing in your letters writ of her?
Brutus: Nothing, Messala.
Messala: That, methinks, is strange.
Brutus: Why ask you? Hear you aught of her in yours?
Maybe it strikes Messala like a flash that Brutus is in no need of any
more bad news just now, and it had better be postponed till after the
battle:
Messala: No, my lord.
Brutus: Now, as you are a Roman, tell me true.
Messala: Then like a Roman bear the truth I tell:
For certain she is dead, and by strange manner.
Brutus: Why, farewell, Portia. We must die, Messala:
With meditating that she must die once
I have the patience to endure it now.
Poor Messala comes to the scratch again rather lamely with a little
weak flattery: "Even so great men great losses should endure;" and
Cassius says, rather mixedly--it might have been the wine--that he has
as much strength in bearing trouble as Brutus has, and yet he couldn't
bear it so.
I have as much of this in art as you,
But yet my nature could not bear it so.
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