to lay aside his unnatural rebellion. Nothing can move him until, his wife and mother coming out to the camp, and throwing themselves at his feet, he reluctantly grants to their prayers and tears the amnesty which all feebler considerations had not availed to obtain. Now suppose, for a moment, that the reprobation which the Christian code of morals pronounces on the principle of revenge, be laid out of view; and let it be granted that Coriolanus had a right to retaliate on the men who had so deeply injured him; yet how shall we excuse the design he meditated of involving his innocent friends in the same heavy penalty? When he was banished, it was by a majority of only three tribes. The whole body of the Patricians were in his favor, and profoundly sympathized in his calamity; and he must have foreseen that if the Volscian soldiery, the ancient and uncompromising enemies of Rome, were admitted into the city with Aufidius, his co-equal in command, at their head, that nothing sacred or venerable would be spared by their rapacious violence—that the rights of property, the quiet and security of old men, the purity of virgins and matrons, and the sanctity of temples—in a word, all that age, or innocence, or religion had consecrated, would be made the inevitable victims of the same ruthless invasion. And all this he contemplated unmoved. Surely, in the very conception of an act implicating, in such tragical consequences, not his enemies merely, but his friends also, and those who should have been dearer to him than his own life—his family and kindred—there was a monstrous perfidy from which every mind that has not been too deeply corrupted to appreciate the force of any moral motive, must revolt with horror.