satire upon Marston’s neologisms; that it at the same time admitted foreign words to the rights of citizenship on easier terms than now is in good measure equally true.  What was of greater import, no arbitrary line had been drawn between high words and low; vulgar then meant simply what was common; poetry had not been aliened from the people by the establishment of an Upper House of vocables, alone entitled to move in the stately ceremonials of verse, and privileged from arrest while they forever keep the promise of meaning to the ear and break it to the sense.  The hot conception of the poet had no time to cool while he was debating the comparative respectability of this phrase or that; but he snatched what word his instinct prompted, and saw no indiscretion in making a king speak as his country-nurse might have taught him.[3] It was Waller who first learned in France that to talk in rhyme alone comported with the state of royalty.  In the time of Shakspeare, the living tongue resembled that tree which Father Hue saw in Tartary, whose leaves were languaged,—­and every hidden root of thought, every subtilest fibre of feeling, was mated by new shoots and leafage of expression, fed from those unseen sources in the common earth of human nature.

The Cabalists had a notion, that whoever found out the mystic word for anything attained to absolute mastery over that thing.  The reverse of this is certainly true of poetic expression; for he who is thoroughly possessed of his thought, who imaginatively conceives an idea or image, becomes master of the word that shall most amply and fitly utter it.  Heminge and Condell tell us, accordingly, that there was scarce a blot in the manuscripts they received from Shakspeare; and this is the natural corollary from the fact that such an imagination as his is as unparalleled as the force, variety, and beauty of the phrase in which it embodied itself.[4] We believe that Shakspeare, like all other great poets, instinctively used the dialect which he found current, and that his words are not more wrested from their ordinary meaning than followed necessarily from the unwonted weight of thought or stress of passion they were called on to support.  He needed not to mask familiar thoughts in the weeds of unfamiliar phraseology; for the life that was in his mind could transfuse the language of every day with an intelligent vivacity, that makes it seem lambent with fiery purpose, and at each new reading a new creation.  He could say with Dante, that “no word had ever forced him to say what he would not, though he had forced many a word to say what it would not,”—­but only in the sense, that the mighty magic of his imagination had conjured out of it its uttermost secret of power or pathos.  He himself says, in one of his sonnets,—­

  “Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
  So far from alteration and quick change? 
  Why, with the time, do I not glance aside
  To new-found methods and to compounds strange? 
  Why write I still all one, ever the same,
  And keep invention in a noted weed
  That every word doth almost tell my name?”