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Untitled Article
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Untitled Article
Bury with those that wore them , these hase slaves , Ere yet ihe fight be done , pack up : —Down with them !' Your feelings are noble , Marcius , but yet you do not sufficiently discriminate . The business is neither more nor less , as regards the quality of the plunder ,, and your great heart would spurn the
most precious and costly treasures equally with the vilest trash ; but your soldiers would have been equally base though they had packed up jewels in the place of such valueless commodity as they are overhauling . Poverty and ignorance have accustomed them to set a value on such things . You have not known poverty , and therefore cannot judge with the same judgment as
the poor . That which you despise , the poor man regards as a treasure . When poverty and ignorance shall cease , men will wonder at their past blindness and filthy avarice . In the sixth scene Marcius enters from a battle with the Volscian troops , in which he has been victorious . His helmet and shield are hacked and battered , and his armour is drenched in gore . Cominius , as he sees him in the distance , exclaims ,
' Who ' yonder , That does appear as he were flayed ? O gods He has the stamp of Marcius ; and I have Before time seen him thus . ' Cominius then asks ,
* Where is that slave Who told me they had beat you to your trenches ? Where is he ? Call him hither . ' The indignation of Marcius again breaks out agaiust the purposeless and unfirm plebeians , while he replies ,
* Let him alone ; He did inform the truth : But for our gentlemen , The common file ( a plague!—Tribunes for them !) The mouse ne ' er shunn'd the cat , as they did budge From rascals worse than they . '
The gentlemen fought , best , Marcius , because they best knew the value of that for which they fought . The plebeians , being poor , had little to lose , and no proper estimation of freedom and independence . They were not certain that they would be worse off under the yoke of the Volsces than of their own patricians . They
might think , like the ass in the fable , whichever side might win they would still have to bear the burden . Had their condition •>< vn that of great comfort , they would have fought as hard to uuiintain it as the American citizens did at the revolution , and as the French citizens did in July . But Marcius has scarcely vented his indignation ere his lofty frelings again break forth , mingled with the secret conviction
Untitled Article
Coriolanus no Aristocrat 133
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1834, page 133, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2630/page/49/
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