And first, it can bring its own words into new combinations; it can join two, and sometimes even more than two, of the words which it already has, and form out of them a new one. Much more is wanted here than merely to attach two or more words to one another by a hyphen; this is not to make a new word: they must really coalesce and grow together. Different languages, and even the same language at different stages of its existence, will possess this power of forming new words by the combination of old in very different degrees. The eminent felicity of the Greek in this respect has been always acknowledged. “The joints of her compounded words”, says Fuller, “are so naturally oiled, that they run nimbly on the tongue, which makes them though long, never tedious, because significant”{77}. Sir Philip Sidney boasts of the capability of our English language in this respect--that “it is particularly happy in the composition of two or three words together, near equal to the Greek”. No one has done more than Milton to justify this praise, or to make manifest what may be effected by this marriage of words. Many of his compound epithets, as ‘golden-tressed’, ‘tinsel-slippered’, ‘coral-paven’, ‘flowry-kirtled’, ‘violet-embroidered’, ‘vermeil-tinctured’, are themselves poems in miniature. Not unworthy to be set beside these are Sylvester’s “_opal-coloured_ morn”, Drayton’s “_silver-sanded_ shore”, and perhaps Marlowe’s “_golden-fingered_ Ind”{78}. Our modern inventions in the same kind are for the most part very inferior: they could hardly fail to be so, seeing that the formative, plastic powers of a language are always waning and diminishing more and more. It may be, and indeed is, gaining in other respects, but in this it is losing; and thus it is not strange if its later births in this kind are less successful than its earlier. Among the poets of our own time Shelley has done more than any other to assert for the language that it has not quite renounced this power; while among writers of prose in these later days Jeremy Bentham has been at once one of the boldest, but at the same time one of the most unfortunate, of those who have issued this money from their mint. Still we ought not to forget, while we divert ourselves with the strange and formless progeny of his brain, that we owe ‘international’ to him--a word at once so convenient and supplying so real a need, that it was, and with manifest advantage, at once adopted by all{79}. {Sidenote: _Adjectives ending in al_}