The words used once only by Shakespeare are often so beautiful and poetical that we wonder how they could fail to be his favorites again and again.  They are jewels that might hang twenty years before our eyes, yet never lose their lustre.  Why were they never shown but once?  They remind me of the exquisite crystal bowl from which I saw a Jewess and her bridegroom drink in Prague, and which was then dashed in pieces on the floor of the synagogue, or of the Chigi porcelain painted by Raphael, which as soon as it had been once removed from the Farnesina table was thrown into the Tiber.  To what purpose was this waste?  Why should they be used up with once using?  Specimens of this sort, which all poets but Shakespeare would have paraded as pets many a time, are multifarious.  Among a hundred others never used but once, we have magical, mirthful, mightful, mirth-moving, moonbeams, moss-grown, mundane, motto, matin, mural, multipotent, mourningly, majestically, marbled, martyred, mellifluous, mountainous, meander, magnificence, magnanimity, mockable, merriness, masterdom, masterpiece, monarchize, menaces, marrowless.

Again, a majority of Shakespearian apa? ?e?? mue?a being familiar to us as household words, it seems impossible that he who had tried them once should have need of them no more.  Instances—­all with initial m—­are as follows:  mechanics, machine, maxim, mission, mode, monastic, marsh, magnify, malcontent, majority, manly, malleable, malignancy, maritime, manna, manslaughter, masterly, market-day-folks, maid-price, mealy, meekly, mercifully, merchant-like, memorial, mercenary, mention, memorandums, mercurial, metropolis, miserably, mindful, meridian, medal, metaphysics, ministration, mimic, misapply, misgovernment, misquote, misconstruction, monstrously, monster-like, monstrosity, mutable, moneyed, monopoly, mortise, mortised, muniments, to moderate, and mother-wit These words, and five thousand more equally excellent, which have remained part of the language of the English-speaking world for three centuries since Shakespeare, and will no doubt continue to belong to it for ever, we are apt to declare he should have worn in their newest gloss, not cast aside so soon.  Why was he as shy of repeating any one of them even once as Hudibras was of showing his wit?—­

      Who bore it about,
  As if afraid to wear it out
  Except on holidays or so,
  As men their best apparel do.

This question, why a full third of Shakespeare’s verbal riches was never brought to light more than once, is probably one which nobody can at present answer even to his own satisfaction.  Yet the phenomenon is so remarkable that every one will try after his own fashion to account for it.  My own attempt at a provisional explanation I will present in the latter part of this paper.