f thought, all kinds of
emotion, a tongue unequaled by any other known to literature! A language
of exhaustless variety; strong without ruggedness, and flexible without
effeminacy. A manly tongue; yet bending itself gracefully and lovingly
to the tenderest and the daintiest needs of woman, and capable of giving
utterance to the most awful and impressive thoughts, in homely words
that come from the lips, and go to the heart, of childhood. It would
seem as if this language had been preparing itself for centuries to be
the fit medium of utterance for the world's greatest poet. Hardly more
than a generation had passed since the English tongue had reached its
perfect maturity; just time enough to have it well worked into the
unconscious usage of the people, when Shakespeare appeared, to lay upon
it a burden of thought which would test its extremest capability. He
found it fully formed and developed, but not yet uniformed and cramped
and disciplined by the lexicographers and rhetoricians,--those martinets
of language, who seem to have lost for us in force and flexibility as
much as they have gained for us in precision. The phraseology of that
day was notably large and simple among ordinary writers and speakers.
Among the college-bred writers and their imitators, there was too
great a fondness for little conceits; but even with them this was an
extraneous blemish, like that sometimes found in the ornament upon a
noble building. Shakespeare seized this instrument to whose tones all
ears were open, and with the touch of a master he brought out all its
harmonies. It lay ready to any hand; but his was the first to use it
with absolute control; and among all its successors, great as some
are, he has had, even in this single respect, no rival. No unimportant
condition of his supreme mastery over expression was his entire freedom
from restraint--it may almost be said from consciousness--in the choice
of language. He was no precisian, no etymologist, no purist. He was not
purposely writing literature. The only criticism that he feared was that
of his audience, which represented the English people of all grades
above the peasantry. These he wished should not find his writing
incomprehensible or dull: no more. If we except the translators of the
Bible, Shakespeare wrote the best English that has yet been written.

[Footnote 56: A native of New York City; distinguished as a student and
editor of Shakespeare, and more recently for his crit