ervantes
has given us 'quixotic'; Swift 'lilliputian'; to Moliere the French
language owes 'tartuffe' and 'tartufferie'. 'Reynard' too, which with us
is a duplicate for fox, while in the French 'renard' has quite excluded
the older 'volpils', was originally not the name of a kind, but the
proper name of the fox-hero, the vulpine Ulysses, in that famous
beast-epic of the middle ages, _Reineke Fuchs_; the immense popularity
of which we gather from many evidences, from none more clearly than from
this. 'Chanticleer' is in like manner the proper name of the cock, and
'Bruin' of the bear in the same poem{100}. These have not made fortune
to the same extent of actually putting out in any language the names
which before existed, but still have become quite familiar to us all.

We must not count as new words properly so called, although they may
delay us for a minute, those comic words, most often comic combinations
formed at will, and sometimes of enormous length, in which, as plays and
displays of power, great writers ancient and modern have delighted.
These for the most part are meant to do service for the moment, and then
to pass away{101}. The inventors of them had themselves no intention of
fastening them permanently on the language. Thus among the Greeks
Aristophanes coined {Greek: mellonikiao:}, to loiter like Nicias, with
allusion to the delays with which this prudent commander sought to put
off the disastrous Sicilian expedition, with not a few other familiar to
every scholar. The humour of them sometimes consists in their enormous
length, as in the {Greek: amphiptolemope:de:sistratos} of Eupolis; the
{Greek: spermagoraiolekitholachanopo:lis} of Aristophanes; sometimes in
their mingled observance and transgression of the laws of the language,
as in the 'oculissimus' of Plautus, a comic superlative of 'oculus';
'occisissimus' of 'occisus'; as in the 'dosones', 'dabones', which in
Greek and in medieval Latin were names given to those who were ever
promising, ever saying "I will give" but never performing their promise.
Plautus with his exuberant wit, and exulting in his mastery and command
of the Latin language, will compose four or five lines consisting
entirely of comic combinations thrown off for the occasion{102}. Of the
same character is Butler's 'cynarctomachy', or battle of a dog and bear.
Nor do I suppose that Fuller, when he used 'to avunculize', to imitate
or follow in the steps of one's uncle, or Cowper, when