Butler—The Vocabulary of Shakespeare. 49 
exeo and the other ineo, the divergent form of “entrance” re¬ 
sulting from its coming through French, while exit was bor¬ 
rowed directly and bodily from 1 Latin with no change of a let¬ 
ter. But both in English had the same father. That father 
since neither of his parents could read, probably learned the 
word “catechism” in school, but H-ErD sets him, down as be¬ 
fore any one else making it to signify “a course of question 
and answer, in 1596, when Falstait says “and so ends my cate¬ 
chism.” Such are specimens of school words known to all 
scholars alike but noted by H-EhD as first treasured up and 
made literary words by the parlous boy. One crumb more is 
Ignis fatuus which in my judgment was first picked up in the 
school though it had been written before he was born in one 
scientific book, Fulke on Meteors, a work which we cannot be¬ 
lieve to have been within Shakespeare’s reach in 1596 when he 
used it. (Hen. iv, iii, iii, 38.) 
A word seems called for regarding a host of bookish Shakes- 
perian words which could not have been picked up among early 
companions of Shakespeare—or indeed among those he was at 
any time associated with. H-E-D makes it very probable that 
this host were for the most part original creations. Many have 
been sought in vain by a thousand eyes in any pre-Shakespear¬ 
ian writer—and others when found were traced out in writers 
lie could not have read—or they were used in senses either un¬ 
known to him or unregarded. Instances crowd upon me but 
my limits exclude mentioning even one. In H-E-D’s hundred 
past issues he has never come empty-handed of words never 
found before in Shakespeare, and in the hundred to come his 
harvest will be as great. Whence came they? is a question 
which volumes cannot answer. 
Whenever I have noted a word in H-E-D set down as found 
in no book earlier than in Shakespeare I credit him with en¬ 
riching our printed speech with that word—catching it up from 
every day speech around him—or forming it as a variant of 
older forms,—or elements—or coining it outright—or bringing 
it in from some foreign tongue:—I could not do otherwise with¬ 
out holding that he discovered, in the few books within his 
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