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    Or so much earth , as was contributed By British pilots , when they heaved the lead ! A land that lies at anchor , and is moored , Wherein men do not Jive , but go on board ; A country that draws fifty foot of water , Wherein men live , as in the hold of nature ; And when the sea does in upon them break , And drowns a province , does but spring a leak . *

    All this , though witty , is in excessive bad taste in the mouth of a patriot ; but it is no impeachment of his morality , whatever it may be of his philosophical intellect . If , at so late a period , Andrew Marvel was thus , surely it is too much to expect that Coriolanus should have evinced greater wisdom , especially when one of his chief teachers was Menenius Agrippa , whose oft-quoted fable

    will well bear a different reading from that which he has given to it . The question is , not whether the notions of Coriolanus would be suited to the present state of society in England , but whether he was really an aristocrat in the sense of the modern meaning which has been applied to the term . The answer must be in the negative ; for he possessed no one quality in common with the mass of the English nobility , and it is simply ludicrous in them

    to take him for a patron saint . He was an aristocrat in the noble meaning of the term . He was one of the best of the people amongst whom he dwelt , without reference to any question of artificial rank ; and had he lived in the present day , his superiority , in all noble qualities , would have been as conspicuous as at the period in which he lived . He must be tried , not by a

    positive standard of excellence , as at present recognised , but by his comparative excellence to those around him , and amongst whom he got his training . To be noble amongst the base is praiseworthy , as well as to be noblest amongst the noble . In going through the play , I doubt not that I shall show Coriolanus to be noble , while the people and those around him were base , and also that he was , in all respects , the direct opposite of the

    most prominent members of the English aristocracy . Some few radicals , misunderstanding my drift , may object to me that the Roman people , as set forth by Shakspeare , are no sample of the English people . I agree to this in general—in the great massthough it would not be difficult to produce portions of them , quite as base as the Romans ; but my present business is not with what the Roman people might have been with better training , but with what they were , as Shakspeare has drawn them .

    The play opens with an attempt at revolution by a large body of the plebeians , armed with all kinds of awkward-shaped tools , adapted to knock out patrician brains , without studying neatness in the modus operandi . To this revolution they are stirred by one of the two causes to which revolutions of a populace are mostly owing , viz . hunger ; religion being the other , and a comparatively

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    44 Coriolanus no Aristocrat .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1834, page 44, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2629/page/46/