This rapidity of composition was probably to some extent responsible for the frequent repetitions of the same word within a short paragraph, the careless tautology of ideas, situations and episodes in his books. Many instances of such episode-repetition could be given. Thus _Comrades_ and _Charles XII_ contain similar phrases about the woman clipping the man's hair of strength, whilst his head rests in her lap. _The Dream Play_ has several scenes which are "the doubles" of those related in _Fairhaven and Foulstrand_. A certain event connected with the tearing up of _The Swiss Family Robinson_ serves the author's psychological purposes both in _To Damascus_ and in _The Dream Play_. In _The Father_ Laura secretly abstracts the contents of her husband's letter-bag, and in _To Damascus_ "The Lady" is guilty of the same offence. Both in _Fairhaven and Foulstrand_ and in _To Damascus_ the woman promises not to read a certain book by the man which deals with his first marriage. She breaks the promise, and the disastrous effect is related with emphasis in both books. In _The Dance of Death_ the remorseless Captain calmly refers to his attempt to drown his wife by pushing her into the water; the incident is more fully worked out in _Fairhaven and Foulstrand_, and is the theme of a story in _Fisher Folk_. Such repetitions cannot be attributed to poverty of imagination; they are the outcome of a too retentive emotional memory and an insistent need of expression, immediate expression. It is curious to note that in spite of the richness and purity of his Swedish, in which the living tongue of the people is heard as never heretofore, there is not infrequently an admixture of foreign words and expressions. That his early verse-play _In Rome_ should contain rhymes on "jouissance" and "connaissance," coupled with Swedish words, and that some of his early poems were adorned in the same manner is not surprising. But when Göran Persson in _Eric XIV_ lightly throws out a hybrid drawing-room phrase: "_Tant mieux_ for my enemies!" a jarring note is introduced which is difficult to explain in a dialogue, otherwise so carefully balanced. The habit of using root-words from many languages, to which he gave Swedish shape, grew upon Strindberg in later years. In the plays his characters suddenly begin to spout Latin and Greek, like the philosophic beggar in _To Damascus_ and the sergeant-major in _Gustavus Adolphus_. Such dramatic exercises in the classics may have had a good and sufficient reason. The use of words of foreign extraction was no doubt fostered by his familiarity with the literature of many countries, and by the limitations of each language. To this may be added his growing interest in philological research. A short time before his death he was keenly at work on the etymology of Finnish, Hebrew and Greek.