46 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
hum was as if he would say, you’ll rue your answer: (Mac. 3. 
6. 41.) and the hum and ha.—the petty bransd that calumny 
with a shrug doth use. 1 Another example which possibly 
should come under the post-nursery period is afforded by 
the root of the word “Hurry.” Hurry both as a noun and a 
verb, like hundreds of other words was created by Shakespeare. 
It is not found either in the Bible or in any other book before 
him. 2 How did he make it ? H-ErD’s answer is that he either 
contracted and twisted it out of the more ancient hurly-burly, 
or that he or some one of the gossips at his mother’s hearth 
expanded it out of hurr, or whir an onomatope or mouthing 
which is naturally used in many unconnected languages to 
mean “rapidity in vibration and in the consequent motion.” 
Analogous word-building every mother sees in her four year 
old hopefuls. Oue outcome from such seances of tattling cro¬ 
nies was that the licensed eavesdropper came out of them like 
the porcupine who in a vineyard rolling over and over on wind¬ 
falls carried off a grape on the point of every quill. But the 
parlous boy’s grapes were words, often words which his own 
quill was foremlost to write. 
My conviction is firm that our greatest master of words se¬ 
cured his vast aggregations on the line I have now sketched by 
observant watch, conscious and as often unconscious—of what 
he heard, and not largely from reading of any kind. Two 
books and no more have been made much of being believed to 
show his name written by his own hand. But these autographs 
are of doubtful genuineness. His best biographers tell us that 
at his death he was owner of scarcely a single volume—for 
otherwise his will would have mentioned such possessions. 
Hor can I ascertain that there existed in his contemporary Lon¬ 
don any such Library within his reach or I may add without 
it as the commentators would persuade us that he studied and 
1 Again, the little pitcher heard toadies defined as “pickthanks,” a 
local word he was one day to explain to Londoners by the line,— 
“Smiling pickthanks and (as epexegetical) base newsmongers.” I 
Hen. iv, 3. 2. 25. 
2 Venus and Adonis, line 904, 1592: 
A second fear, 
Which madly hurries her she knows not whither. 
