And I have seen thee pause and take thy breath,
When that a ring of Greeks have hemm'd thee in,
Like an Olympian wrestling.

And the old man continues in the like strain until almost breath must fail him. The instantaneous and involuntary homage paid by Aufidius to Coriolanus is the same in kind-the overwhelming joy of standing face to face with veritable human greatness and nobility.

But Coriolanus has found in Antium no second home. Honoured and deferred to, tended on, and treated as almost sacred, he is still the "lonely dragon that his fen makes fear'd." Cut off from his kindred and his friends, wronged by his own passionate sense of personality, his violent egoism, he resolves to stand

As if a man were author of himself,
And knew no other kin.

But the loves and loyalties to which he has done violence, react against him. The struggle, prodigious and pathetic, begins, between all that is massive, stern, inflexible and all that is tender and winning in his nature; and the strength is subdued by the weakness. It is as if an oak were rent and uprooted not by the stroke of lightning, but by some miracle of gentle yet irresistible music. And while Coriolanus yields under the influence , of an instinct not to be controlled, he possesses the distinct consciousness that such yielding is mortal to He has come to hate and to conquer, but he must needs perish and love: :

himself.

My wife comes foremost; then the honour'd mould
Wherein this trunk was framed, and in her hand
The grandchild to her blood. But, out, affection!
All bond and privilege of nature, break!

Let it be virtuous to be obstinate!

What is that curt'sy worth? Or those doves' eyes,
Which can make gods forsworn? I melt, and am not
Of stronger earth than others. My mother bows;
As if Olympus to a molehill should

In supplication nod; and my young boy

Hath an aspect of intercession, which
Great nature cries 'Deny not.'

The convulsive efforts to maintain his hardness and rigidity are in vain; Coriolanus yields; his obstinacy and pride are broken; he is compelled to learn that a man cannot stand as if he were author of himself. And so the fortunes of Coriolanus fall, but the man rises with that fall.

Delivered from patrician pride, and his long habit of egoism, Coriolanus cannot be. The purely human influences have reached him through the only approaches by which he was accessible-through his own family. To the plebeian class he must still remain the intolerant patrician. Nevertheless, he has undergone a profound experience; he has acknowledged purely human influences in the only way in which it was possible for him to do so. No single experience, Shakspere was aware, can deliver the soul from the long habit of passionate egoism. And, accordingly, at the last it is this which betrays him into the hands of the conspirators. His conduct before Rome is about to be judicially enquired into at Antium. But the word "boy," ejaculated against him by Aufidius, "touches Coriolanus into an ecstasy of passionate rage: "—

Boy! O slave!

Pardon me, lords, 'tis the first time that ever

I was forced to scold.

Boy! false hound!

If you have writ your annals true, 'tis there
That, like an eagle in a dove-cote, I
Flutter'd your Volscians in Corioli;
Alone, I did it. Boy!

And in a moment the swords of the conspirators have pierced him. A Volscian lord, reverent for fallen greatness, protects the body :

Tread not upon him. Masters all, be quiet;

Put up your swords.

So suddenly has he passed from towering passion to the helplessness of death; the victim of his own violent egoism, and uncontrollable self-will. We remain with the sense that a great gap in the world has been made; that a sea-mark standing every flaw" has for all time disappeared. We see the lives of smaller 'men still going on; we repress all violence of lamentation, and bear about with us a memory in which pride and pity are blended.

CHAPTER VII.

THE HUMOUR OF SHAKSPERE.

A STUDY of Shakspere which fails to take account of Shakspere's humour must remain essentially incomplete. The character and spiritual history of a man who is endowed with a capacity for humorous appreciation of the world must differ throughout and in every particular from that of the man whose moral nature has never rippled over with genial laughter. At whatever final issue Shakspere arrived after long spiritual travail as to the attainment of his life, that precise issue rather than another was arrived at in part by virtue of the fact of Shakspere's humour. In the composition of forces which determined the orbit traversed by the mind of the poet this must be allowed for as a force among others, in importance not the least, and efficient at all times, even when little apparent. A man whose visage "holds one stern intent" from day to day, and whose joy becomes at times almost a supernatural rapture, may descend through circles of hell to the narrowest and the lowest; he may mount from sphere to sphere of Paradise until he stands within the light of the divine majesty; but he will hardly succeed in presenting us with an adequate image of life as it is on this earth of ours in its oceanic amplitude and variety. A few men of genius there have been, who, with vision

Y

penetrative as lightning, have gazed as it were through life, at some eternal significances of which life is the symbol. Intent upon its sacred meaning they have had no eye to note the forms of the grotesque hieroglyph of human existence. Such men are not framed for laughter. To this little group the creator of Falstaff, of Bottom, and of Touchstone does not belong.

Shakspere, who saw life more widely and wisely than any other of the seers, could laugh. That is a comfortable fact to bear in mind; a fact which serves to rescue us from the domination of intense and narrow natures, who claim authority by virtue of their grasp of one half of the realities of our existence and their denial of the rest. Shakspere could laugh. But we must go on to ask "What did he laugh at? and what was the manner of his laughter?" There are as many modes of laughter as there are facets of the common soul of humanity to reflect the humorous appearances of the world. Hogarth in one of his pieces of coarse, yet subtile engraving, has presented a group of occupants of the pit of a theatre sketched during the performance of some broad comedy or farce. What proceeds upon the stage is invisible and undiscoverable save as we catch its reflection on the faces of the spectators, in the same way that we infer a sunset from the evening flame upon windows that front the west. Each laughing face in Hogarth's print exhibits a different mode or a different stage of the risible paroxysm. There is the habitual enjoyer of the broad comic abandoned to his mirth which is open and unashamed, mirth which he is evidently a match for, and able to sustain. By his side is a com