Butler—The Vocabulary of Shakespeare. 55 
itself enjailed. It must have remained mute and inglorious 
forever but for his vocabulary. It makes no difference whether 
he early realized that no genius can say to words any more 
than a sculptor to marble: “I have no need of you. 7 ’ His 
whole course of action had been as if he had so realized, and 
that he unjust work for words by wit,—and not by witchcraft— 
and that wit depends on dilatory time. Thus his wit had free 
course and was glorified along the highway of words. 
In London he soon saw that his vocabulary was capital 
enough. Ho matter how low the first labors of his hands. 
Thanks to his words* he must have been almost at once lifted 
up. Some hack playwriter who had well-nigh ended a task 
would be too drunk or too lazy to give it his last hand, and the 
country lad was laid hold of as Taek-atra-pinch.. Thrown into 
water, She proved in a moment that he could swim,. In the 
first retouching or bringing to a finish, his acceptable words 
and honeyed sentences which no man could mend assured his 
success, his indispensability. ILe never thereafter ceased to be 
encored. Springing up and up, high, higher, highest, as as¬ 
sistant, co-worker, rival, and master of his masters, and even 
of all masters in his art, he demonstrated that five words be¬ 
fitting any one of his countless characters would outweigh and 
outlive and outshine ten thousand words in a tongue unknown 
and therefore dead to the common folk. 
Such in genesis may have been Shakespeare’s vocabulary. 
