Let us first, however, notice another question concerning the apa? ?e?? mue?a—­namely, that which respects their origin.  Where did they come from? how far did Shakespeare make them? and how far were they ready to his hand?  No approach to answering this inquiry can be made for some years.  Yet as to this matter let us rejoice that the unique dictionary of the British Philological Society is now near publication.  This work, slowly elaborated by thousands of co-workers in many devious walks of study on both sides of the Atlantic, aims to exhibit the first appearance in a book of every English word.  In regard to the great bulk of Shakespeare’s diction it will enable us ten years hence to determine how much of it was known to literature before him, and how much of it he himself gathered or gleaned in highways and byways, or caused to ramify and effloresce from Saxon or classical roots and trunks, thus “endowing his purposes with words to make them known.”  Meantime, we are left to conjectures.  As of his own coinage I should set down such vocables as motley-minded, mirth-moving, mockable, marbled, martyred, merriness, marrowless, mightful, multipotent, masterdom, monarchize, etc. etc.

But, however much of his linguistic treasury Shakespeare shall be proved to have inherited ready-made—­whatever scraps he may have stolen at the feast of languages—­it is clear that he was an imperial creator of language, and lived while his mother-tongue was still plastic.  Having a mint of phrases in his own brain, well might he speak with the contempt he does of those “fools who for a tricksy word defy the matter;” that is, slight or disregard it.  He never needed to do that.  Words were “correspondent to his command, and, Ariel-like, did his spiriting gently.”

In a thousand cases, however, Shakespeare cannot have rejected words through fear lest he should repeat them.  It has taken three centuries for the world to ferret out his apa? ?e?? mue?a:  can we believe that he knew them all himself?  Unless he were the Providence which numbers all hairs of the head, he had not got the start of the majestic world so far as that, however myriad-minded we may consider him.  An instinct which would have rendered him aware of each and every individual of five thousand that he had employed once only would be as inconceivable as that of Falstaff, which made him discern the heir-apparent in Prince Hal when disguised as a highwayman.  In short, Shakespeare could not be conscious of all the words he had once used, more than Brigham Young could recognize all the wives he had once wedded.

In the absence of other theories concerning the reasons for Shakespeare’s apa? ?e?? mue?a being so abundant, I throw out a suggestion of my own till a better one shall supplant it.