om, the exchange, the bower, of hunting,
falconry, angling, war, and even the technical terms of the Law, of
Medicine, and Divinity, all as they actually lived on the tongues of
men, and just as life had steeped its sense and spirit into them. This
it is, in great part, that has made him so high and so wide an
authority in verbal definition: as he took the meaning of words at
first hand, and so preserved them with all their native sap and juice
still in them; so lexicography uses him as its best guide. Hence, too,
the prodigious compass, variety, limberness, and ever-refreshing
raciness of his diction: no familiarity can suck the verdure out of
it: the perennial dews of nature are incorporated in its texture: so
that no words but his own can fitly describe it; as when he says of
Cleopatra, "Other women cloy the appetites they feed; but she makes
hungry where most she satisfies." Yet there is very seldom any smack
of vulgarity in his language, save when the right delineation of
character orders it so: words, that are nothing but vulgar as used by
vulgar minds, are somehow in his use washed clean of their vulgarity;
for there was a cunning alchemy in his touch that could instantly
transmute the basest materials into "something rich and strange." In
this respect, Mr. White justly applies to him what Laertes says of his
sister:

"Thought and affliction, passion, Hell itself,
She turns to favour and to prettiness."

The Poet's arrangement of words is often very peculiar, and sometimes
such as to render his meaning rather obscure; not obscure, perhaps, to
his contemporaries, whose apprehension was less fettered by
grammatical rules; but so to us, because our wits are more tied up
from nimbleness with notions of literal correctness, and with habits
of mind contracted from long intercourse with parsing writers. I mean
that Shakespeare often sorts and places his words in what seems to us
an arbitrary manner, throwing them out, so to speak, almost at random.
Here is a small instance: "At our more consider'd time, we'll read,
answer, and think upon this business." Of course, _our more consider'd
time_ means, when we have taken time for further consideration. So too
when the King suddenly resolves on sending Hamlet to England, and on
having him there put to death; fearing a popular tumult, because
Hamlet is loved by the multitude, he says, "To bear all smooth and
even, this sudden sending him away must seem deliberate pau