As regards the other points in Shakespeare’s arrangement of words, I have little more to say than that here again his practice has nothing bookish or formal about it, but draws right into life and the living speech of men.  He has no settled rules, no favourite order.  In this respect, as in others, language was in his hands as limber as water at the fountain.  He found it full of vital flexibility, and he left it so; nay, rather made it more so.  As he did not learn his craft in the little narrow world of school rhetoricians, where all goes by the cut-and-dry method, and men are taught to “laugh by precept only, and shed tears by rule,” but from the spontaneous rhetoric of the great and common world; so we find him varying the order of his words with the unconscious ease of perfect freedom, and moulding his language into an endless diversity of shapes.  Perhaps I cannot better express his style in this behalf than by saying that he pitches right into the matter, instead of walking or wording round it; not looking at all to the gracefulness of his attitudes or the regularity of his motions, but driving straight ahead at directness, compactness, perspicuity, and force; caring little for the grammar of his speech, so it convey his sense; and taking no thought about the facility or even possibility of parsing, but only to get the soul of his purpose into a right working body.  Thus in Cymbeline, iii. 2, where the hard-beset Imogen is first beguiled into the hope of meeting her husband at Milford Haven: 

                                   “Then, true Pisanio,—­
    Who long’st, like me, to see thy lord; who long’st,—­
    O, let me bate,—­but not like me;—­yet long’st,—­
    But in a fainter kind;—­O, not like me,
    For mine’s beyond beyond;—­say, and speak thick,—­
    Love’s counsellor should fill the bores of hearing
    To th’ smothering of the sense,—­how far it is
    To this same blessed Milford:  and, by th’ way,
    Tell me how Wales was made so happy as
    T’ inherit such a haven:  but, first of all,
    How we may steal from hence; and for the gap
    That we shall make in time, from our hence-going,
    And our return, t’ excuse:—­but, first, how get hence: 
    Why should excuse be born or e’er begot? 
    We’ll talk of that hereafter.”

What a chaos of verbal confusion have we here, until we penetrate to the soul of the heroine! and then what a pavilion of life and beauty this soul organizes that chaos into!  How ignorant the glorious creature is of grammar; yet how subtile and sinewy of discourse!  How incorrect her placing of words, yet how transfigured with grace of feeling and intelligence!  Just think into what a nice trim garden of elocution a priest of the correct and classical church, like Pope, would have dressed this free outpouring of the speaker’s heart.  No doubt the language would be faultlessly regular; you might analyze and parse it currente