Hence we find him using the special terms of the street, the farm, the garden, the shop, the kitchen, the pantry, the wine-vault, the forecastle, the counting-room, the exchange, the bower, of hunting, falconry, angling, war, and even the technical terms of the Law, of Medicine, and Divinity, all as they actually lived on the tongues of men, and just as life had steeped its sense and spirit into them.  This it is, in great part, that has made him so high and so wide an authority in verbal definition:  as he took the meaning of words at first hand, and so preserved them with all their native sap and juice still in them; so lexicography uses him as its best guide.  Hence, too, the prodigious compass, variety, limberness, and ever-refreshing raciness of his diction:  no familiarity can suck the verdure out of it:  the perennial dews of nature are incorporated in its texture:  so that no words but his own can fitly describe it; as when he says of Cleopatra, “Other women cloy the appetites they feed; but she makes hungry where most she satisfies.”  Yet there is very seldom any smack of vulgarity in his language, save when the right delineation of character orders it so:  words, that are nothing but vulgar as used by vulgar minds, are somehow in his use washed clean of their vulgarity; for there was a cunning alchemy in his touch that could instantly transmute the basest materials into “something rich and strange.”  In this respect, Mr. White justly applies to him what Laertes says of his sister: 

    “Thought and affliction, passion, Hell itself,
    She turns to favour and to prettiness.”

The Poet’s arrangement of words is often very peculiar, and sometimes such as to render his meaning rather obscure; not obscure, perhaps, to his contemporaries, whose apprehension was less fettered by grammatical rules; but so to us, because our wits are more tied up from nimbleness with notions of literal correctness, and with habits of mind contracted from long intercourse with parsing writers.  I mean that Shakespeare often sorts and places his words in what seems to us an arbitrary manner, throwing them out, so to speak, almost at random.  Here is a small instance:  “At our more consider’d time, we’ll read, answer, and think upon this business.”  Of course, our more consider’d time means, when we have taken time for further consideration.  So too when the King suddenly resolves on sending Hamlet to England, and on having him there put to death; fearing a popular tumult, because Hamlet is loved by the multitude, he says, “To bear all smooth and even, this sudden sending him away must seem deliberate pause”; that is, a thing that we have paused and deliberated upon.  Here it would seem that the Poet, so he got the several elements of thought and the corresponding parts of expression drawn in together, cared little for the precise form and order of the latter, trusting that the hearer or reader would mentally shape and place them so as to