Butler—The Vocabulary of Shakespeare . 53 
writer as a youthful aud unhandled colt, stung by the hot con¬ 
dition of his blood, like his own prince Hal when he put off the 
prince and put on the natural man. We see him up to every 
thing and down about as low, a hail-fellow-well-met among vag¬ 
abonds more or less fools, tavernhaunters, priests of the old and 
the new faith, sham soldiers, star-gazers, conjurers, witches, 
minions of the moon. Though sharp to 1 read the mind in the 
face, yes, because he was thus sharp, he says to all, “Speak, 
that I may know: you!” and was such a sponge that there was 
not a word which fell from their tongues which he had not 
made his own. His maxim was, “Hot a shop, church, court- 
session, hanging, but yields a careful man work,” and words 
to boot. Wearied and footsore on the tramp to London—fear¬ 
ing each bush an officer, and skulking in: by-ways—his pedes¬ 
trian talk was with more divergent types than we encounter 
amjong Chaucer’s wayfarers to Canterbury or Bunyan’s pilgrims, 
and he drank deep from wells which if not pure and undefiled 
became for his genius the dramatic water of life. His vocabu¬ 
lary was thus like Lincoln’s from' first to last, a natural growth 
compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, 
and its expansion was greater year by year like that of a tree in 
which the present year’s increment overlaps all the past. It 
was to be an unknown tongue to no- variety of auditors: for it 
had come from many minds and many hearts but above all from! 
heterogeneous humors, for it is in humor that Shakespeare is 
first and the rest nowhere,—humor of which he snatched so 
much that he left very little for Milton and other immortals. 
Had the pre-London years been spent among stainless associates 
content to dwell in decencies forever, they would have yielded 
no word harvest either tragic or comic of the real world, out 
of joint and full of knaves and fools who make it more so. In 
fact, his walks and conversations while he was tried and tutored 
in the world were all a repertory of dramatic speech. Some¬ 
thing of his word age he found, more of it found him. 
In judging the youngster by the moral law, we may be mis¬ 
led through ignorance, as Prince Hal’s father was regarding 
him. Phillipps, who more than any other man has wiped as¬ 
persions from his bard’s good name, declares “there was noth- 
