." A merely brilliant man--a
Sheridan, for instance--might make the endeavour, and gain some
considerable applause. But Shakespeare for the moment lived the part,
the humour came to him with the part, whether the humour of clowns and
gravediggers, of Jaques, or of the moody prince of Denmark.

Essential also to such humour is the broad and tolerant temper which can
not only suffer fools gladly, as being a large and representative class
of God's creatures, but can actually rejoice in their folly as a thing
delectable to a healthy contemplation.

But when the piece has been thus constructed with a master hand, and
when the characters have been informed by imagination with all the
convincingness of infinitely varied life, with humour, with sound and
healthy and impartial understanding, much is still left. There is still
to be considered the language or expression in which all is clothed. And
in this respect the writer who has written best in any tongue, falls,
when compared with Shakespeare, a step into the rear. Not Milton, for
all his organ flood of noble phrase; not Shelley, for all his burning
and rapturous utterance, can vie with the actor-playwright of the Globe
in his gift of eloquence. It is entirely marvellous and beyond all
explanation. No mere study or scholarship could attain to that
inexhaustible fund, not merely of words, but of the right words. Orators
and writers there are a many who never fail to find a word, and a good
word, for the rounding of their sentences. But Shakespeare's words are
not merely good words; they are the best words. Even the bare vocabulary
of Burke or Macaulay would seem second-rate beside the vocabulary of
Shakespeare. It is a commonplace to dilate upon the fact that
Shakespeare has used 15,000 words, while Milton, our poet of widest
reading and erudition, has but 8,000. I do not attach so much importance
to that enumeration. The subjects, the sides of life, the classes of
persons of whom Shakespeare treats, are so comprehensive of high and
low, serious and jocose, while Milton's are confined to a range of such
seriousness and dignity, that the comparison is but fallacious.
Nevertheless this vast repertoire of words is in itself an amazing
phenomenon. Still more amazing is the consummate tact with which he
makes use of them, in sentences so terse and clear that they
increasingly pass into the proverbs of everyday. And most amazing is
that, with all his characters, and all their spee