After Troilus and Cressida, in which our poet took his material from the old Greek heroic time, I take up Coriolanus, because we here see how he understood treating Roman affairs. In this drama he sketches the partisan strife of the patricians and plebeians in ancient Rome. I will not directly assert that this portrayal agrees exactly in every detail with the annals of Roman history; but our poet has understood and depicted the real life and nature of that strife with deepest truthfulness. We can judge of this the more accurately because our own times afford so many subjects which recall those of the troubled discord which once raged in old Rome between the privileged patricians and the degraded plebeians. We might often deem that Shakespeare was a poet of the present day, who lived in the London of our own life, sketching the Tories and Radicals of our own time disguised as Romans. What might confirm us in such a fancy is the great resemblance which really exists between the ancient Romans and modern Englishmen, and the statesmen of both races. In fact, a certain prosaic hardness, greed, love of blood, unwearying perseverance and firmness of character, is as peculiar to the English of to-day as to the old Romans, only that the latter were more land-rats than water-rats; but in the unamiableness, in which both attained the utmost height, they are perfectly equal and alike. The most striking elective affinity is to be observed between the nobility of both races. The English nobleman, like the same character of yore in Rome, is patriotic; love for his native land keeps him, in spite of all political-legal differences, intimately allied to the plebeian, and this sympathetic bond so brings it about that the English aristocrats and democrats, like the Romans before them, form one and an united race. In other countries where nobility is bound, less to the land than to the person of him who is their prince, or are devoted to the peculiar interests of their class, this is not the case. Then again we find among the English, as once among the Roman nobles, a striving towards established authority as the highest, most glorious, and also indirectly the most profitable—I say indirectly the most profitable, because, as once in Rome, so now in England, the management of the highest offices under government are made profitable only by misuse of influence and traditional exactions, that is to say, indirectly. Those offices are the aim of youthful education in the great families of England, just as they were among the Romans, and with the one as with the other, skill in war and oratory avail as the means to future position. So among the English, as it was among the Romans, the tradition of reigning and of administration is the hereditary endowment of noble families, and through this it may be that the English Tories will long be indispensable—yes, and so long in power as were the senatorial families of old Rome.