CORIOLANUS

Shakespeare has in this play shown himself well versed in history
and state affairs. CORIOLANUS is a storehouse of political
commonplaces. Any one who studies it may save himself the trouble of
reading Burke's Reflections, or Paine's Rights of Man, or the
Debates in both Houses of Parliament since the French Revolution or
our own. The arguments for and against aristocracy or democracy, on
the privileges of the few and the claims of the many, on liberty and
slavery, power and the abuse of it, peace and war, are here very
ably handled, with the spirit of a poet and the acuteness of a
philosopher. Shakespeare himself seems to have had a leaning to the
arbitrary side of the question, perhaps from some feeling of
contempt for his own origin; and to have spared no occasion of
baiting the rabble. What he says of them is very true: what he says
of their betters is also very true, though he dwells less upon it.--
The cause of the people is indeed but little calculated as a subject
for poetry: it admits of rhetoric, which goes into argument and
explanation, but it presents no immediate or distinct images to the
mind, 'no jutting frieze, buttress, or coigne of vantage' for poetry
'to make its pendant bed and procreant cradle in'. The language of
poetry naturally falls in with the language of power. The
imagination is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty: it takes from
one thing to add to another: it accumulates circumstances together
to give the greatest possible effect to a favourite object. The
understanding is a dividing and measuring faculty: it judges of
things, not according to their immediate impression on the mind, but
according to their relations to one another. The one is a
monopolizing faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of present