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.
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