“mangled Myrmidons”; it is too visibly “noseless, handless, hacked and chipped” as it comes to us, crying on Hemings and Condell.  And it is in this unlucky scene that unkindly criticism has not unsuccessfully sought for the gravest faults of language and manner to be found in Shakespeare.  For certainly it cannot be cleared from the charge of a style stiffened and swollen with clumsy braid and crabbed bombast.  But against the weird sisters, and her who sits above them and apart, more awful than Hecate’s very self, no mangling hand has been stretched forth; no blight of mistranslation by perversion has fallen upon the words which interpret and expound the hidden things of their evil will.

To one tragedy as to one comedy of Shakespeare’s, the casual or the natural union of especial popularity with especial simplicity in selection and in treatment of character makes it as superfluous as it would be difficult to attempt any application of analytical criticism.  There is nothing in them of a nature so compound or so complex as to call for solution or resolution into its primal elements.  Here there is some genuine ground for the generally baseless and delusive opinion of self-complacent sciolism that he who runs may read Shakespeare.  These two plays it is hardly worth while to point out by name:  all probable readers will know them at once for Macbeth and As You Like It.  There can hardly be a single point of incident or of character on which the youngest reader will not find himself at one with the oldest, the dullest with the brightest among the scholars of Shakespeare.  It would be an equal waste of working hours or of playtime if any of these should devote any part of either a whole-schoolday or a holiday to remark or to rhapsody on the character of Macbeth or of Orlando, of Rosalind or of Lady Macbeth.  He that runs, let him read:  and he that has ears, let him hear.

I cannot but think that enough at least of time has been spent if not wasted by able and even by eminent men on examination of Coriolanus with regard to its political aspect or bearing upon social questions.  It is from first to last, for all its turmoil of battle and clamour of contentious factions, rather a private and domestic than a public or historical tragedy.  As in Julius Caesar the family had been so wholly subordinated to the state, and all personal interests so utterly dominated by the preponderance of national duties, that even the sweet and sublime figure of Portia passing in her “awful loveliness” was but as a profile half caught in the background of an episode, so here on the contrary the whole force of the final impression is not that of a conflict between patrician and plebeian, but solely that of a match of passions played out for life and death between a mother and a son.  The partisans of oligarchic or democratic systems may wrangle at their will over the supposed evidences of Shakespeare’s prejudice against this creed and prepossession in