170 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts, and Letters. 



Meantime, we are left to conjectures. As of his own coinage I 

 should set down such words as mirth- moving, merriness, motley- 

 minded, masterdom, mockable, marbled, martyred, marrowless, 

 mightful, multipotent, monarchize, eic, etc. 



Professor Skeat, the most painstaking investigator known to me 

 of early English, has discovered the word "disappointed" in no 

 author earlier than Shakspere. Nor has Shakspere made use of 

 that word more than once, namely in the line : 



" Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled." 

 In that line all the words without exception are "Aiza^ Izybiizva. 



The word "disappointed " is not employed by Shakspere in its 

 modern meaning, but as signifying unprepared, or better perhaps 

 unshriven. 



But however much of his linguistic treasury Shakspere 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. 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 spright- 

 iog gently." When has any verbal necessity compelled him to 

 give his sense a turn that does not naturally belong to it? 



It is very possible that Shakspere frequently shunned expres- 

 sions he had once preferred and that because otherwise his style 

 would become monotonous, and so cloy the hungry edge of ap- 

 petite. According to his own authority, " when they seldom 

 come they wished for come." And again : 



"Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare, 

 Since seldom coming in the long year set, 

 Like stones of worth they thinly placed are, 

 Or captain jewels in the carcanet." 



In thousands of case?, however, Shakspere cannot have rejected 

 words through fear lest he should repeat them. It has taken 

 three centuries for the world to ferret out his "Ako.^ Itjoixeva., can 

 we believe that he himself knew them all? Unless he were the 

 Providence which numbers all hairs of the head, he had not got 



