Butler—The Vocabulary of Shakespeare. 
47 
conned. No such oasis as yet in that Sahara. All the more 
was his word-harvest rather from folks than from books. 
No sooner did he step out of the nursery into his father’s 
slaughter-house—or butchery as it was named in common par¬ 
lance—than he saw the fat of a beeve rolled up in a lump and 
covered with its own caul—and was told that the mass w T as 
called a “Keech,”—Without a thought of any use of the vocable 
he kept it in hand—used it as a name for a butcher’s wife'— 
but reached its highest use only in his latest play and that in 
envenoming the keenest sarcasm on Wolsey who was both cor¬ 
pulent and the son of a butcher. The sarcasm was: 
I wonder, 
That such a keech can with his very bulk 
Take up the rays of the beneficial sun (the king) 
And keep A from the earth. 
(H. VIII. I. I. 55) 
Keech! What a soul of wit. in the brevity of a syllable! 
But his plays abound in vocables which were unknown in dic¬ 
tionaries till derived from his writings—and v 7 hich often tes¬ 
tify their origin to have been from the streets and not from the 
schools Thus his words are: “gillivors which some call na¬ 
ture’s bastards.” “Long purples wdiich maids call dead men’s 
fingers, and shepherds give a grosser name.” “The fearful 
spout wdiich shipmen do the hurricano call.” This last word 
hurricano wdthout dropping the Spanish termination and first 
brought out the year after the Armada. Such locutions be¬ 
token a vocabulary gained more through ears than eyes, more 
through hearing than through reading. 
As in the sitting-room of the' birth-house and in busi¬ 
ness stands near it, the unfledged poet was elsewhere a word- 
finder even where he w r as by no means a word-seeker. Among 
his unsought findings in the free-school were vocables which no¬ 
body before him had gathered up either there or anywhere. 
One of these utterances seems to have been the expression Hon- 
orificabilitudini tatibus—his longest word, the longest too in 
English or indeed in any tongue outside of Greek which dis¬ 
tances all competition in the Aristophanic mammoth—biggest 
born of earth (Love’s Labor Lost, V. I, 44.) 
