ved
to have inherited ready-made--whatever scraps he may have stolen at the
feast of languages--it is clear that he was an imperial creator of
language, and lived while his mother-tongue was still plastic. Having a
mint of phrases in his own brain, well might he speak with the contempt
he does of those "fools who for a tricksy word defy the matter;" that
is, slight or disregard it. He never needed to do that. Words were
"correspondent to his command, and, Ariel-like, did his spiriting
gently."

In a thousand cases, however, Shakespeare cannot have rejected words
through fear lest he should repeat them. It has taken three centuries
for the world to ferret out his _apa? ?e?? mue?a_: can we believe that he
knew them all himself? Unless he were the Providence which numbers all
hairs of the head, he had not got the start of the majestic world so far
as that, however myriad-minded we may consider him. An instinct which
would have rendered him aware of each and every individual of five
thousand that he had employed once only would be as inconceivable as
that of Falstaff, which made him discern the heir-apparent in Prince Hal
when disguised as a highwayman. In short, Shakespeare could not be
conscious of all the words he had once used, more than Brigham Young
could recognize all the wives he had once wedded.

In the absence of other theories concerning the reasons for
Shakespeare's _apa? ?e?? mue?a_ being so abundant, I throw out a
suggestion of my own till a better one shall supplant it.

Shakespeare's forte lay in characterization, and that endlessly
diversified. But when he sketched each several character it seems that
he was never content till he had either found or fabricated the aptest
words possible for representing its form and pressure most true to life.
No two characters being identical in any particular more than two faces
are, no two descriptions, as drawn by his genius, could repeat many of
the selfsame characterizing words. Each of his vocables thus became like
each of the seven thousand constituents of a locomotive, which fits the
one niche it was ordained to fill, but everywhere else is out of place,
and even _dislocated_. The more numerous his ethical differentiations,
the more his language was differentiated.

His personages were as multifarious as have been portrayed by the whole
band of Italian painters; but, as a wizard in words, he resembled the
magician in mosaic, who can delineate in stone every feat