favour of that:  a third bystander may rejoice in the proof thus established of his impartial indifference towards either:  it is all nothing to the real point in hand.  The subject of the whole play is not the exile’s revolt, the rebel’s repentance, or the traitor’s reward, but above all it is the son’s tragedy.  The inscription on the plinth of this tragic statue is simply to Volumnia Victrix.

A loftier or a more perfect piece of man’s work was never done in all the world than this tragedy of Coriolanus:  the one fit and crowning epithet for its companion or successor is that bestowed by Coleridge—­“the most wonderful.”  It would seem a sign or birthmark of only the greatest among poets that they should be sure to rise instantly for awhile above the very highest of their native height at the touch of a thought of Cleopatra.  So was it, as we all know, with William Shakespeare:  so is it, as we all see, with Victor Hugo.  As we feel in the marvellous and matchless verses of Zim-Zizimi all the splendour and fragrance and miracle of her mere bodily presence, so from her first imperial dawn on the stage of Shakespeare to the setting of that eastern star behind a pall of undissolving cloud we feel the charm and the terror and the mystery of her absolute and royal soul.  Byron wrote once to Moore, with how much truth or sincerity those may guess who would care to know, that his friend’s first “confounded book” of thin prurient jingle ("we call it a mellisonant tingle-tangle,” as Randolph’s mock Oberon says of a stolen sheep-bell) had been the first cause of all his erratic or erotic frailties:  it is not impossible that spirits of another sort may remember that to their own innocent infantine perceptions the first obscure electric revelation of what Blake calls “the Eternal Female” was given through a blind wondering thrill of childish rapture by a lightning on the baby dawn of their senses and their soul from the sunrise of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra.

Never has he given such proof of his incomparable instinct for abstinence from the wrong thing as well as achievement of the right.  He has utterly rejected and disdained all occasion of setting her off by means of any lesser foil than all the glory of the world with all its empires.  And we need not Antony’s example to show us that these are less than straws in the balance.

   Entre elle et l’univers qui s’offraient a la fois
   Il hesita, lachant le monde dans son choix.

Even as that Roman grasp relaxed and let fall the world, so has Shakespeare’s self let go for awhile his greater world of imagination, with all its all but infinite variety of life and thought and action, for love of that more infinite variety which custom could not stale.  Himself a second and a yet more fortunate Antony, he has once more laid a world, and a world more wonderful than ever, at her feet.  He has put aside for her sake all other forms and figures of womanhood; he, father or creator of Rosalind, of Cordelia, of Desdemona, and of Imogen, he too, like the sun-god and sender of all song, has anchored his eyes on her whom “Phoebus’ amorous pinches” could not leave “black,” nor “wrinkled deep in time”; on that incarnate and imperishable “spirit of sense,” to whom at the very last