relation, one with the other, than most men have any notion of; and it is one thing to use our mother-tongue as if it belonged to us, and another to be the puppets of an overmastering vocabulary.  “Ye know not,” says Ascham, “what hurt ye do to Learning, that care not for Words, but for Matter, and so make a Divorce betwixt the Tongue and the Heart.” Lingua Toscana in bocca Romana is the Italian proverb; and that of poets should be, The tongue of the people in the mouth of the scholar.  We intend here no assent to the early theory, or, at any rate, practice, of Wordsworth, who confounded plebeian modes of thought with rustic forms of phrase, and then atoned for his blunder by absconding into a diction more Latinized than that of any poet of his century.

Shakspeare was doubly fortunate.  Saxon by the father and Norman by the mother, he was a representative Englishman.  A country-boy, he learned first the rough and ready English of his rustic mates, who knew how to make nice verbs and adjectives curtsy to their needs.  Going up to London, he acquired the lingua aulica precisely at the happiest moment, just as it was becoming, in the strictest sense of the word, modern,—­just as it had recruited itself, by fresh impressments from the Latin and Latinized languages, with new words to express the new ideas of an enlarging intelligence which printing and translation were fast making cosmopolitan, words which, in proportion to their novelty, and to the fact that the mother-tongue and the foreign had not yet wholly mingled, must have been used with a more exact appreciation of their meaning.[2] It was in London, and chiefly by means of the stage, that a thorough amalgamation of the Saxon, Norman, and scholarly elements of English was brought about.  Already, Puttenham, in his “Arte of English Poesy,” declares that the practice of the capital and the country within sixty miles of it was the standard of correct diction, the jus et norma loquendi.  Already Spenser had almost recreated English poetry,—­and it is interesting to observe, that, scholar as he was, the archaic words which he was at first over-fond of introducing are often provincialisms of purely English original.  Already Marlowe had brought the English unrhymed pentameter (which had hitherto justified but half its name, by being always blank and never verse) to a perfection of melody, harmony, and variety which has never been surpassed.  Shakspeare, then, found a language already to a certain extent established, but not yet fetlocked by dictionary- and grammar-mongers,—­a versification harmonized, but which had not yet exhausted all its modulations, or been set in the stocks by critics who deal judgment on refractory feet, that will dance to Orphean measures of which their judges are insensible.  That the language was established is proved by its comparative uniformity as used by the dramatists, who wrote for mixed audiences, as well as by Ben Jonson’s