To speak seriously with a writer in the Encyclopaedia Britannica: “His manner in diction was progressive, and this progress has been deemed so clearly traceable in his plays that it can enable us to determine their chronological sequence.”  The result is, that while other authors satiate and soon tire us, Shakespeare’s speech for ever “breathes an indescribable freshness.”

                Age cannot wither
  Nor custom stale his infinite variety.

In the last line I have quoted there is a apa? ?e?? mue?a but it is a word which I think you would hardly guess.  It is the last word—­variety.

On every average page of Shakespeare you are greeted and gladdened by at least five words that you never saw before in his writings, and that you never will see again, speaking once and then for ever holding their peace—­each not only rare, but a nonsuch—­five gems just shown, then snatched away.  Each page is studded with five stars, each as unique as the century-flower, and, like the night-blooming cereus, “the perfume and suppliance of a minute”—­ipsa varietate variora.  The mind of Shakespeare was bodied forth as Montezuma was apparelled, whose costume, however gorgeous, was never twice the same.  Hence the Shakespearian style is fresh as morning dew and changeful as evening clouds, so that we remain for ever doubtful in relation to his manner and his matter, which of them owes the greater debt to the other.  The Shakespearian plots are analogous to the grouping of Raphael, the characters to the drawing of Michael Angelo, but the word-painting superadds the coloring of Titian.  Accordingly, in studying Shakespeare’s diction I should long ago have said, if I could, what I read in Arthur Helps, where he treats of a perfect style—­that “there is a sense of felicity about it, declaring it to be the product of a happy moment, so that you feel it will not happen again to that man who writes the sentence, nor to any other of the sons of men, to say the like thing so choicely, tersely, mellifluously and completely.”

In the central court of the Neapolitan Museum I saw grape-clusters, mouldings, volutes, fingers and antique fragments of all sorts wrought in rarest marble, lying scattered on the pavement, exposed to sun and rain, cast down the wrong side up, and as it were thrown away, as when the stones of the Jewish sanctuary were poured out in every street.  Nothing reveals the sculptural opulence of Italy like this apparent wastefulness.  It seems to proclaim that Italy can afford to make nothing of what would elsewhere be judged worthy of shrines.  We say to ourselves, “If such be the things she throws away, what must be her jewels?” A similar feeling rises in me while exploring Shakespeare’s prodigality in apa? ?e?? mue?a.  His exchequer appears more exhaustless than the Bank of England.

James D. Butler.

AN EPISODE OF SPANISH CHIVALRY.