Why star’st thou in my face?  If thou wilt stay,
   Leap in my arms:  mine arms are open wide: 
   If not—­turn from me, and I’ll turn from thee;
   For though thou hast the power to say farewell,
   I have not power to stay thee.

But we may look long in vain for the like of this passage, taken from the crudest and feeblest work of Marlowe, in the wide and wordy expanse of King Edward III.

{247} A pre-Shakespearean word of single occurrence in a single play of Shakespeare’s, and proper to the academic school of playwrights.

{248} The First Part of Tamburlaine the Great, Act v.  Sc. ii.

{252} It may be worth a remark that the word power is constantly used as a dissyllable; another note of archaic debility or insufficiency in metre.

{255} Yet another essentially non-Shakespearean word, though doubtless once used by Shakespeare; this time a most ungraceful Gallicism.

{256} It may obviate any chance of mistake if I observe that here as elsewhere, when I mention the name that is above every name in English literature, I refer to the old Shakespeare, and not to “the new Shakspere”; a novus homo with whom I have no acquaintance, and with whom (if we may judge of a great—­or a little—­unknown after the appearance and the bearing of those who select him as a social sponsor for themselves and their literary catechumens) I can most sincerely assert that I desire to have none.

{261} Surely, for sweet’st we should read swift’st.

{262a} This word occurs but once in Shakespeare’s plays—­

   And speaking it, he wistly looked on me;

   (King Richard II.  Act v.  Sc. 4.)

and in such a case, as in the previous instances of the words invocate and endamagement, a mere [Greek text] can carry no weight of evidence with it worth any student’s consideration.

{262b} This form is used four times by Shakespeare as the equivalent of Bretagne; once only, in one of his latest plays, as a synonym for Britain.

{263a} Another word indiscoverable in any genuine verse of Shakespeare’s, though not (I believe) unused on occasion by some among the poets contemporary with his earlier years.

{263b} This word was perhaps unnecessarily altered by our good Capell to “tender.”

{264a} Yet another and a singular misuse of a word never so used or misused by Shakespeare.

{264b} Qu.  Why, so is your desire:  If that the law, etc.?

{264c} Sic.  I should once have thought it impossible that any mortal ear could endure the shock of this unspeakable and incomparable verse, and find in the passage which contains it an echo or a trace of the “music, wit, and oracle” of Shakespeare.  But in those days I had yet to learn what manner of ears are pricked up to listen “when rank Thersites opes his mastiff jaws”