en able to appreciate literature, he
would have discovered that it is the unruliness not of the democracy but
of the aristocracy against which Ulysses--or, if you prefer it,
Shakespeare--inveighs in this speech. The speech is aimed at the self-will
and factiousness of Achilles and his disloyalty to Agamemnon. If there are
any moderns who come under the noble lash of Ulysses, they must be sought
for not among either French or Russian revolutionists, but in the persons
of such sound Tories as Sir Edward Carson and such sound patriots as Mr.
Lloyd George. It is tolerably certain that neither Ulysses nor Shakespeare
foresaw Sir Edward Carson's escapades or Mr. Lloyd George's insurbordinate
career as a member of Mr. Asquith's Cabinet. But how admirably they sum up
all the wild statesmanship of these later days in lines which Mr. Whibley,
accountably enough, fails to quote:

They tax our policy, and call it cowardice;
Count wisdom as no member of the war;
Forestall prescience, and esteem no act
But that of hand; the still and mental parts--
That do contrive how many hands shall strike,
When fitness calls them on, and know, by measure
Of their observant toil, the enemies' weight--
Why, this hath not a finger's dignity.
They call this bed-work, mappery, closet-war:
So that the ram, that batters down the wall,
For the great swing and rudeness of his poise,
They place before his hand that made the engine,
Or those that with the fineness of their souls
By reason guide his execution.

There is not much in the moral of this speech to bring balm to the soul of
the author of the _Letters of an Englishman_.

Mr. Whibley is not content, unfortunately, with having failed to grasp the
point of _Troilus and Cressida_. He blunders with equal assiduity in
regard to _Coriolanus_. He treats this play, not as a play about
Coriolanus, but as a pamphlet in favour of Coriolanus. He has not been
initiated, it seems, into the first secret of imaginative literature,
which is that one may portray a hero sympathetically without making
believe that his vices are virtues. Shakespeare no more endorses
Coriolanus's patrician pride than he endorses Othello's jealousy or
Macbeth's murderous ambition. Shakespeare was concerned with painting
noble natures, not with pandering to their vices. He makes us sympathize
with Coriolanus in his heroism, in his sufferings, in his return to his
better nature, in his death; but from Shake