The character of Coriolanus, though high and noble, is quite as likely to inspire resentment as to awaken sympathy. It contains many elements and all of them are good; but chiefly it typifies the pride of intellect. This, in itself a natural feeling and a virtuous quality, practically becomes a vice when it is not tempered with charity for ignorance, weakness, and the lower orders of mind. In the character of Coriolanus it is not so tempered, and therefore it vitiates his greatness and leads to his destruction. Much, of course, can be urged in his defence. He is a man of spotless honour, unswerving integrity, dauntless courage, simple mind, straightforward conduct, and magnanimous disposition. He is always ready to brave the perils of battle for the service of his country. He constantly does great deeds--and would continue constantly to do them--for their own sake and in a spirit of total indifference alike to praises and rewards. He exists in the consciousness of being great and has no life in the opinions of other persons. He dwells in "the cedar's top" and "dallies with the wind and scorns the sun." He knows and he despises with active and immitigable contempt the shallowness and fickleness of the multitude. He is of an icy purity, physical as well as mental, and his nerves tingle with disgust of the personal uncleanliness of the mob. "Bid them wash their faces," he says--when urged to ask the suffrages of the people--"and keep their teeth clean." "He rewards his deeds with doing them," says his fellow-soldier Cominius, "and looks upon things precious as the common muck of the world." His aristocracy does not sit in a corner, deedless and meritless, brooding over a transmitted name and sucking the orange of empty self-conceit: it is the aristocracy of achievement and of nature--the solid superiority of having done the brightest and best deeds that could be done in his time and of being the greatest man of his generation. It is as if a Washington, having made and saved a nation, were to spurn it from him with his foot, in lofty and by no means groundless contempt for the ignorance, pettiness, meanness, and filth of mankind. The story of Coriolanus, as it occurs in Plutarch, is thought to be fabulous, but it is very far from being fabulous as it stands transfigured in the stately, eloquent tragedy of Shakespeare. The character and the experience are indubitably representative. It was some modified form of the condition thus shown that resulted in the treason and subsequent ruin of Benedict Arnold. Pride of intellect largely dominated the career of Aaron Burr. More than one great thinker has split on that rock, and gone to pieces in the surges of popular resentment. "No man," said Dr. Chapin, in his discourse over the coffin of Horace Greeley, "can lift himself above himself." He who repudiates the humanity of which he is a part will inevitably come to sorrow and ruin. It is perfectly true that no intellectual person should in the least depend upon the opinions of others--which, in the nature of things, exist in all stages of immaturity, mutability, and error--but should aim to do the greatest deeds and should find reward in doing them: yet always the right mood toward humanity is gentleness and not scorn. "Thou, my father," said Matthew Arnold, in his tribute to one of the best men of the century, "wouldst not be saved alone." To enlighten the ignorant, to raise the weak, to pity the frail, to disregard the meanness, ingratitude, misapprehension, dulness, and petty malice of the lower orders of humanity--that is the wisdom of the wise; and that is accordant with the moral law of the universe, from the operation of which no man escapes. To study, in Shakespeare, the story of Coriolanus is to observe the violation of that law and the consequent retribution.