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    simply a figure of speech , to express your contempt for those , who , as Menenius expresses it , ' Though abundantly they lack discretion , Yet are they passing cowardly . ' Their indiscretion and cowardice are alike the result of bad training . You , who were nursed in the patrician palace , know not the evils which surround the infant in the plebeian hovel , even before the hour of his birth , and prey upon and weigh him down as he grows up to manhood . Think on the misery that must have been endured , ere such proverbs were invented , as

    ' Hunger broke stone walls ; that dogs must eat ; That meat was made for mouths ; that the gods sent not Corn for the rich men only . * Think on this , and pity those who suffer under base notions , from which you are fortunate enough to have escaped . He whose whole life is taken up with the consideration how food is to be procured , can have no leisure for the cultivation of the higher qualities . For scornful and taunting is your phrase ,

    * Go , get you home , you—fragments I The new tribunes , Junius Brutus and Sicinius Velutus , now enter , and the news arrives that the Volsces are in arms . Marcius , by his known skill and valour , may fairly claim the chief command of the army destined to repel them , but , without a thought of ambition , save the longing to earn honour , he at once agrees

    to become a subordinate , to serve his country in the only way he can , viz . in the battle-field . Something too much of animal spirit there is in him , too much of the aspiration after personal excitement in the expressed wish to strike once more at Tullus ' face , ' yet even in this * there breaks through all the noble spirit which scorns to crush the weak , which seeks to cope with an

    equal only . The Volsces are in arms , therefore the war is a defensive one , a just quarrel for every Roman , yet the plebeians , so late in mutiny against their own patricians , steal away by twos and threes , and our friend ' great toe / the fuller , amongst them ; whereat Marcius again gives vent to the scorn wherewith his heart is full . Piercing is his taunt : * The Volsces have much corn ; take these rats thither To gnaw their garners : Worshipful mutineers , Your valour puts well forth ; pray follow . ' All retire but the two tribunes , and their dialogue lets us into the knowledge of their characters . No high-minded patriots were they , no glorious upholders of the crushed plebeians , from pure love to humanity , no friends of those who had none to help them , but merely ambitious plebeians , hating the patricians because they were not patricians themselves , seeking to ride on the people ' s shoulders into places of power and profit , under the

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    No . 85 . B

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    Coriolanus no Aristocrat 49

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1834, page 49, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2629/page/51/