The '^' Arta^ Aeyofxeua in Shahspere. 167 



my eye, but more hundreds must have been passed unnoticed. 

 Aside from the 549 once-used words in Henry Y., already men- 

 tioned, I know not that such verbal statistics have been gathered. 

 But they would not be without manifold utilities. They would 

 aid in judging by style concerning the genuineness of doubtful 

 passages. They would show how far Shakspere's alms basket of 

 such words, which he calls " fire-new," continued to the last, like 

 charity, which never faileth. 



The array of once-used words which has been drawn up in the 

 present writing must, as I think, surprise any one who passes 

 them in review. The further one pushes research in the same 

 line, the more his wonder will grow. Of compounds with the 

 pre-fix re, like reiterate and resignation, he will discover one hun- 

 dred and fifty lacking two, no one of which he will meet with 

 again. To the same class of vocables undiscoverable a second 

 time belongs every word in the line, " Unhouseled, disappointed, 

 unaneled," as I have already stated, and the italicized words in 

 the following phrases : 



" Horns whelked and waved like the enridged sea " 



" Massy staples 

 And corresponsive and fulfilling bolts sperr up." 



In the following nine lines, which are almost consecutive, the 

 words in italics, numbering nine (or ten if we count lash which is 

 no where else employed in the sense of the thong or cord of a 

 whip), make their entrances and exits once for all. 



" In shape no bigger than an agate-stone 

 Her wagon-spokes made of long spinners' legs, 

 The cover of the -wings of grasshoppers, 

 The traces of the smallest spider's web. 

 Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat 

 Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash a -filin. 

 Time out of mind the fairies' coaelimakers 

 And sometimes comes she with a tithe-pig'' s tail, 

 Then dreams he of another beneficey 



And yet Romeo and Juliet, the ^vh.^ from which this passage 

 is extracted, was among Shakspeare's earliest efforts. Though a 

 prolific writer for twenty years afterward, he had no occasion for 

 anyone of these words even once again, — and repeated the phrase 

 ^' time out of mind " only on one occasion. 



