had been no National Latin Tragedy, Frederic Schlegel suggests, because no Latin Dramatist could venture to do this very thing; but of course Caesar or Coriolanus on the Tiber was one thing, and Caesar or Coriolanus on the Thames was another; and an English author might be allowed, then, to say of the one, with impunity, what it would certainly have cost him his good right hand, or his ears, or his head, to say of the other,—what it did cost the Founder of this school in philosophy his head, to be suspected of saying of the other. Nevertheless, the great question between an arbitrary and a constitutional government, the principle of a government which vests the whole power of the state in the uncontrolled will of a single individual member of it; the whole history and philoscphy of a military government, from its origin in the heroic ages, from the crowning of the military hero on the battle field in the moment of victory, to the final consummation of its conquest of the liberty of the subject, could be as clearly set forth under the one form as the other; not without some startling specialities in the filling up, too, with a tone in the details now and then, to say the least, not exclusively antique, for this was a mode of treating classical subjects in that age, too common to attract attention. And thus, whole plays could be written out and out, on this very subject. Take, for instance, but these two, Coriolanus and Julius Caesar,-plays in which, by a skilful distribution of the argument and the action, with a skilful interchange of parts now and then,- the boldest passages being put alternately into the mouths of the Tribunes and Patricians,-that great question, which was so soon to become the outspoken question of the nation and the age, could already be discussed in all its vexed and complicated relations, in all its aspects and bearings, as deliberately as it could be to-day; exactly as it was, in fact, discussed not long afterwards in swarms of English pamphlets, in harangues from English pulpits, in English parliaments and on English battle-fields, exactly as it was discussed when that lofty Roman scene' came to be acted over' here, with the cold-blooded prosaic formalities of an English judicature. IT To dew the sovereign Flower, and drown the weeds.'-Macbeth. 'Have you heard the argument?' CHAPTER I. THE ELIZABETHAN HEROISM. 'Mildly is the word.' In a better hour, Let what is meet be said it must be meet, And throw their power in the dust.' T is the Military Chieftain of ancient Rome who pronounces here the words in which the argument of the Elizabethan revolutionist is so tersely comprehended. It is the representative of an heroic aristocracy, not one of ancient privilege merely, not one armed with parchments only, claiming descent from heroes; but the yet living leaders of the rabble people to military conquest, and the only leaders who are understood to be able to marshal from their ranks an effective force for military defence. But this is not all. The scope of the poetic design requires here, under the sheath which this dramatic exhibition of an ancient aristocracy offers it, the impersonation of another and more sovereign difference in men; and this poet has ends to serve, to which a mere historical accuracy in the reproduction of this ancient struggle of state-factions, in an extinct European common-wealth, is of little consequence; though he is not wanting in that either, or indifferent to it, when occasion serves. From the speeches inserted here and there, we find that this is at the same time an aristocracy of learning which is put upon the stage here, that it is an aristocracy of statesmanship and civil ability, that it is composed of the select men of the state, and not its elect only; that it is the true and natural head of the healthful body politic, and not the horn of the monster' only. This is the aristocracy which appears to be in session in the back ground of this piece at least, and we are not without some occasional glimpses of their proceedings, and this is the element of the poetic combination which comes out in the dialogue, whenever the necessary question of the play requires it. For it is the collision between the civil interests and the interests which the unlearned heroic ages enthrone, that is coming off here. It is the collision between the government which uneducated masses of men create and confirm, and recreate in any age, and the government which the enlightened man 'in a better hour' demands, which the common sense and sentiment of man, as distinguished from the brute, demands, whether in the one, or the few, or the many. This is the struggle which is getting into form and order here, here first. These are the parties to it, and in the reign of the last of the Tudors and the first of the Stuarts, they must be content to fight it out on any stage which their time can afford to lease to them for that performance, without being over scrupulous as to the names of the actors, or the historical correctness of the costumes, and other particulars; not minding a little shuffling in the parts, now and then, if it suits their poet's convenience, who has no conscience at all on such points, and who is of the opinion that this is the very stage which an action of such gravity ought to be exhibited on, in the first place; and that a very careful and critical rehearsal of it here, ought to precede the performance elsewhere; though a contrary opinion was not then without its advocates. - It is as the mouth-piece of this intellectual faction in the state, while it is as yet an aristocracy, contending with the physical force of it, struggling for the mastery of it with its numerical majority; it is the Man in the state, the new MAN struggling with the chief which a popular ignorance has endowed with dominion over him; it is the HERO who contends for the majesty of reason and the kingdom of the mind, it is the new speaker, the new, and now at last, commanding speaker for that law, which was old when this myth was named, which was not of yesterday when Antigone quoted it, who speaks now from this Roman's lips, these words of doom,—the reflection on the 'times deceased,' the prophecy of things not yet come to life,' the word of new ages. 'IN A REBELLION, When what's not MEET, but what must be, was law, And throw their power in the dust.' Not in the old, sombre, Etruscan streets of ancient Rome, not where the Roman market-place joined the Capitoline hill and began to ascend it, crossed the road from Palatinus thither, and began to obstruct it, not in the courts and colonnades of the primeval hill of palaces, were the terms of this proposal found. And not from the old logician's chair, was the sweep of their comprehension made; not in any ancient school of rhetoric or logic were they cast and locked in that conjunction. It was another kind of weapon that the old Roman Jove had to take in hand, when amid the din of the Roman forum, he awoke at last from his bronze and marble, to his empirical struggle, his unlearned, experimental struggle with the wolf and her nursling, with his own baptized, red-robed, usurping Mars. It was not with any such subtlety as this, that the struggle of state forces which, under one name or another, sooner or later, in the European states is sure to come, had hitherto been conducted. And not from the lips of the haughty patrician chief, rising from the dust of ages at the spell of genius, to encounter his old plebeian vanquishers, and fight his long-lost battles o'er again, at a showman's bidding, for a showman's greed — to be stung anew into patrician scorn-to repeat those rattling volleys of the old martial Latin wrath, 'in states unborn' and 'accents then unknown,' for an hour's idle entertainment, for 'a six-pen'orth or shilling's worth' of gaping amusement to a playhouse throng, not-NOT from any such source came that utterance. a It came from the council-table of a sovereignty that was plotting here in secret then the empire that the sun shall not set on; whose beginning only, we have seen. It came from the secret chamber of a new union and society of men, union based on a new and, for the first time, scientific acquaintance with the nature that is in men, with the sovereignty that is in all men. It was the Poet of this society who put those words together - the Poet who has heard all its pros and cons, who reports them all, and gives to them all their exact weight in the new balance of his decisions. Among other things, it was understood in this association, that the power, which was at that time supreme in England, was in fact, though not in name, a popular power, a power, at least, sustained only by the popular will, though men had not, indeed, as yet, begun to perceive that momentous circumstance, a power which, being but the horn and noise o' the monster,' was able to oppose its absolute shall' to the embodied wisdom of the state, not to its ancient immemorial government only, but to 'its chartered liberties in the body of the weal,' and 'to a graver bench than ever frowned in Greece'; and the Poet has put on his record of debates on those questions of gravity,' that were agitating then this secret Chamber of Peers, a distinct demand on the part of this ancient leadership, the leadership of the honoured number,' the honourable and right honourable few, that this mass of ignorance, and stupidity, and blind custom, and incapacity for rule, this combination of mere instinctive force, which the physical majority in unlearned times constitutes, |