And feebling such as stand not in their liking
Below their cobbled shoes. They say there’s grain enough!
(I. i. 192.)
In short their temper is hardly parodied in the modern skit,
Who fills the butchers’ shops with large blue flies?
And if they resemble the ignorant fanatics of later days in the unreasonableness of their complaints, they resemble them too, as we have seen, in the unreasonableness of their remedies. If things were as the play implies what help would lie in constitutional reform? They are no better than the starving Sansculottes who sought to allay their hunger by snatching new morsels of the royal prerogative. It really reads like a scene in Carlyle’s Paris of 1790 a.d., and not like any scene in Plutarch’s Rome of 494 b.c., when Coriolanus describes the delight of the famine-stricken crowds at getting their representatives:
They threw their caps
As they would hang them on the horns o’ the moon,
Shouting their emulation.
(I. i. 216.)