of patriotism, of public spirit, or even of honourable ambition in short, it is not at all to win their respect and goodwill, but only to feed his inordinate egotism, that he enacts the hero. They are even so liberal as to grant that the fault is something ingenerate in his nature, so that he cannot altogether help it, and are ready to make large allowance for him on this score: but then the more he helps them by his deeds, the more he wounds them with his insolence; nay, he seems to delight in serving them, only that he may turn his service into a vantage-ground for spurning them; and this is what they cannot bear, because it seems to them, as indeed it is, truly inhuman, and renders him unfit for any sort of intercourse with men.

There is withal much in the people that is really not deserving of respect. This the hero seizes on greedily, and makes the most of, as favouring that whereon his pride mainly fastens; and at the same time winks away whatever there is in them of a redeeming quality: he scorns their meanness, and is glad to find it in them, as giving him cause for scorning them: he prefers to see in them nothing but what is vile, and would fain make them as vile as he thinks them to be, that so his contempt may stand justified in his own sight. Still he is placed where his pride cannot reach its mark but by their suffrage; for its dearest gratification, he must pay his court to that which most galls and offends it. Here the people have a strong hold upon him. So nothing will do but that he try to extort their admiration and suffrage while making them hate his person: what he most prides himself upon is to have his greatness force honours from them notwithstanding his insolence to them; because such a contradiction between their feeling and their voting serves to emphasize his superiority. This is well shown in what falls from one of those almost characterless speakers in whom the Poet sometimes puts much candour 'and shrewdness of observation, and then uses them as the mouthpiece of his own judgment: "If he did not care whether he had their love or no, he'd waved indifferently

: 'twixt doing them neither good nor harm; but he seeks their hate with greater devotion than they can render it him, and leaves nothing undone that may fully discover him their opposite." Hence, when he goes out to beg their voices, he is careful to spice his requests with mockery, and to let them see that his spirit disclaims what his tongue speaks: then, if they excuse his spirit on the score of his formal compliance, this will be his triumph, and his pride will take a special benefit in their pocketing of his insults.

It is a bold but most natural stroke of character, that the hero, notwithstanding his alleged intense aversion to seeming at all the thing he is not, can yet dissemble to perfection when the doing so does not conflict with his ruling passion. From his bearing towards the people, one would suppose it were quite impossible for him to practise any sort of counterfeit or concealment. On this ground Me

nenius apologizes for his rough bluntness of manner:

"His nature is too noble for the world:

He would not flatter Neptune for his trident,

Or Jove for's power to thunder. His heart's his mouth :
What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent."
"Consider this: - he has been bred i' the wars
Since he could draw a sword, and is ill school'd

In bolted language; meal and bran together
He throws without distinction."

Thus others think him, and he thinks himself, utterly incapable of simulating any thing on the outside that is not really in his heart. And when his friends entreat him to comply externally and in form with the people's humour, it really seems a necessity of nature with him to be the same without as he is within: so, after trying his best, apparently, to frame his mind to their request, he frankly declares at last,

"I will not do 't;

Lest I surcease to honour mine own truth,

And by my body's action teach my mind

A most inherent baseness."

But all this, as the sequel proves, is simply because his

pride does not draw in that direction, or rather draws directly the other way. For, after the sentence of exile, and when he is preparing to leave, he forthwith goes to practising the closest reserve and concealment of his mind, and appears indeed a complete master in dissimulative art. With his inner man in a perfect tempest of passion, he is nevertheless outwardly calm and serene: while the darkest thoughts of revenge are boiling within, his face and speech carry the style of the blandest and smoothest composure. And he not only seems placid and quiet himself, while his mother is deeply agitated with grief and anger, but goes to schooling her with her own former lessons of calmness and patience, reminding her how she "us'd to load him with precepts that would make invincible the heart that conn'd them"; insomuch that none suspect the stormy resolves and purposes he is forming. In all which his action is no doubt spontaneous, and proceeds rather from an instinct of passion than from any conscious art: but this only infers the more strongly how the same cause which, before, prevented his dissembling, now renders him a consummate dissembler. As he was then too proud to be other in mouth than he was in heart towards the people, so here his pride naturally puts him upon making his face the visard and not the index of his mind. Egotism and conscience are indeed very different things. But they sometimes get strangely mixed.

Coriolanus, however, is not altogether "himself his world and his own god": his will no doubt is to be so, and this is perhaps the most constant force in him; but he has other and better forces, which often rise against his egotism, and sometimes prevail over it, and at last carry the victory clean away from it. His character indeed is not a little mixed: and all its parts, good and bad, are fashioned on so large a scale as to yield matter enough for making out a strong case either way, according as the observer's mind is set to a course of all blame or all praise; while at the same time the several lines are so bold and pronounced, that it is

not easy for one to keep clear of all extremes, and so to take the impression of a given side as to fit the subject all round. Nor is his pride, with all its anti-social harshness, destitute of amiable and engaging features. There are

some points of nobleness and magnanimity about it: the various regards of rank, family, country, talents, and courage enter into its composition, causing it to partake the general greatness of his character; and as it grows partly by what he derives from and shares with others, as well as by what is peculiar to himself, so it involves much of the spirit that commonly issues in great virtues as well as great faults. Hence it is not such as, of itself, to burn out the better juices of manhood: modesty, gratitude, openness of heart and hand, go in company with it. And so far it is of a genius and temper to keep clean and sweet the breast. where it dwells; the principle of that inward discipline under which tenderness of heart, purity and rectitude of life, and many of the milder and gentler qualities have their best cherishing; a natural source of replenishment to whatever virtues it guards, because its own best nourishment is in the noble growth it fosters. Which is well evinced in that, with all his passionate craving of renown, he still counts it among his chief honours to be the cause that others are honoured. And if he is jealous of the position of his fellow Patricians, he is jealous of their merit too; would guard their virtue as carefully as their rank; is not less strenuous to have them deserve than to have them hold the place of supreme power and reverence in the State. So the Poet read in Plutarch how he besought the Patricians "to let the people know by their deeds, that they did not so much pass them in power and riches as in true nobility and valiantness." Nor should it be omitted that the admission of the people to a direct share in the government is a new thing with them: he is not used to it; he resents it as an invasion of ancient right; he fears it as a seed of political anarchy and dissolution. Old Rome was indeed a wonderful nation: Shakespeare

could not but be fascinated with the record of its splendours and greatness; and the hero's character offered him an apt and inviting occasion for representing the struggle between those two antagonist forces in the State whose reconcilement and unity did so much towards building and cementing the mighty structure.

I have spoken of the hero's modesty; yet I have to confess that there is something rather equivocal about it. He cannot indeed frame his mouth to the language of flattery, and he has an honest aversion to being flattered; and so far his temper is noble and just. Withal it seems really to offend him to hear himself praised; yet he is so ostentatious and emphatic, not to say supercilious, in his disgust of the thing, as to breed some doubt whether, after all, it is any thing but egotism in disguise, or whether it is not rather the offspring of arrogance than of real modesty. When he so energetically scouts to "hear his nothings monster'd," there is in his manner a strong relish of haughty contempt for his praisers, or a certain censorious loftiness of mind, as if he craved occasions for rebuking his friends and admirers, and of making them feel his immense superiority. Men have sometimes towered so high in self-approval as to scorn the approval of their fellow-men. And so our hero's behaviour in this point smacks a good deal as if his self-applause were so enormous, that the strongest applause of others seems to him utterly inadequate, or as if he felt his greatness to be of so transcendent a pitch as to make breath poor and speech unable." Such a desperate calenture of egotism may, and sometimes does, pass for modesty, for it is apt to use the style of that virtue; the man seeming to shrink from the voice of praise, while in truth his extreme self-sufficiency merely leads him to think that none are able to appreciate him, or good enough to praise him. That Shakespeare saw the germs of this disease in the deep intricacies of the human heart, is apparent from his saying of another famous character, that "he speaks not to himself but with a pride that quarrels at self-breath." And the

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