But the secret of force in writing lies not in the pedigree of nouns and adjectives and verbs, but in having something that you believe in to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it.  It is when expression becomes an act of memory, instead of an unconscious necessity, that diction takes the place of warm and hearty speech.  It is not safe to attribute special virtues (as Bosworth, for example, does to the Saxon) to words of whatever derivation, at least in poetry.  Because Lear’s “oak-cleaving thunderbolts,” and “the all-dreaded thunder-stone” in “Cymbeline” are so fine, we would not give up Wilton’s Virgilian “fulmined over Greece,” where the verb in English conveys at once the idea of flash and reverberation, but avoids that of riving and shattering.  In the experiments made for casting the great bell for the Westminster Tower, it was found that the superstition which attributed the remarkable sweetness and purity of tone in certain old bells to the larger mixture of silver in their composition had no foundation in fact.  It was the cunning proportion in which the ordinary metals were balanced against each other, the perfection of form, and the nice gradations of thickness, that wrought the miracle.  And it is precisely so with the language of poetry.  The genius of the poet will tell him what word to use (else what use in his being poet at all?); and even then, unless the proportion and form, whether of parts or whole, be all that Art requires and the most sensitive taste finds satisfaction in, he will have failed to make what shall vibrate through all its parts with a silvery unison,—­in other words, a poem.

We think the component parts of English were in the latter years of Elizabeth thus exquisitely proportioned one to the other.  Yet Bacon had no faith in his mother-tongue, translating the works on which his fame was to rest into what he called “the universal language,” and affirming that “English would bankrupt all our books.”  He was deemed a master of it, nevertheless; and it is curious that Ben Jonson applies to him in prose the same commendation which he gave Shakspeare in verse, saying, that he “performed that in our tongue which may be compared or preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome”; and he adds this pregnant sentence:—­“In short, within his view and about his time were all the wits born that could honor a language or help study.  Now things daily fall:  wits grow downwards, eloquence grows backwards.”  Ben had good reason for what he said of the wits.  Not to speak of science, of Galileo and Kepler, the sixteenth century was a spendthrift of literary genius.  An attack of immortality in a family might have been looked for then as scarlet-fever would be now.  Montaigne, Tasso, and Cervantes were born within the same fourteen years; and in England, while Spenser was still delving over the propria que maribus, and Raleigh launching paper navies, Shakspeare was stretching his baby hands