For the ground on which the classes or estates, and their respective claims to the government, are tried here, is the ground of the common-weal; and the question as to the fitness of any existing class in the state for an exclusive, unlimited control of the welfare of the whole, is more than suggested. That which stops short of the weal of the whole for its end, is that which is under criticism here; and whether it exist in 'the one,' or 'the few,' or 'the many,'—and these are the terms that are employed here,—whether it exist in the civil magistracy, sustained by a popular submission, or in the power of the victorious military chief, at the head of his still extant and resistless armament, it is necessarily rejected as a principle of sovereignty and permanence, in this purely scientific view of the human conditions of it. It is a question which this author handles with a thorough impartiality, in all his political treatises, let them come in what name and form they will, with more or less clearness, indeed, as the circumstances seem to dictate.
But nowhere is the whole history of the military government, collected from the obscurity of the past, and brought out with such inflexible design—with such vividness and strength of historic exhibition, as it is here. It is traced to its beginnings in the distinctions which nature herself creates,—those physical, and moral, and intellectual distinctions, with which she crowns, in her happier moods, the large resplendent brows of her born kings and masters. It is traced from its origin in the crowning of the victorious chief on the field of battle, to the moment in which the sword of military conquest is turned back on the conquerors by the chief into whose hands they gave it; and the sword of conquest abroad becomes, at home, the sword of state.
Nay, this Play goes farther, and embraces the contingency of a foreign rule—one, too, in which the conqueror takes his surname from the conquest; it brings home 'the enemy of the whole state,' as a king, in triumph to the capital, whose streets he has filled with mourning; and though the author does not tell us in this case, at he does in another, that the nation was awed 'with an offertory of standards' in the temple, and that 'orisons and Te Deums were again sung,'—the victor 'not meaning that the people should forget too soon that he came in by battle'—points, not much short of that, in the way of speciality, are not wanting. More than one conqueror, indeed, looks out from this old chieftain's Roman casque. 'There is a little touch of Harry in the scene'; and though the author goes out of his way to tell us that 'he must by no means say his hero is covetous,' it will not be the Elizabethan Philosopher's fault, if we do not know which Harry it is that says—
If you have writ your annals true,'tis there, That like an eagle in a dove-cote, I Flutter'd your Volsces in Corioli: Alone, I did it.
* * * * *
Auf. Read it, noble lords; But tell the traitor, in the highest degree He hath abused your powers.
Cor. Traitor!—How now?
Auf. Ay, traitor, Marcius.
Cor. Marcius!
Auf. AY, Marcius, Caius Marcius; Dost thou think I'll grace thee with THAT ROBBERY, thy STOLEN NAME CORIOLANUS in CORIOLI?'—[the conqueror in the conquest.]