Again the names of popular characters in literature, such as have taken strong hold on the national mind, give birth to a number of new words. Thus from Homer we have ‘mentor’ for a monitor; ‘stentorian’, for loud-voiced; and inasmuch as with all of Hector’s nobleness there is a certain amount of big talking about him, he has given us ‘to hector’{99}; while the medieval romances about the siege of Troy ascribe to Pandarus that shameful ministry out of which his name has past into the words ‘to pandar’ and ‘pandarism’. ‘Rodomontade’ is from Rodomont, a blustering and boasting hero of Boiardo, adopted by Ariosto; ‘thrasonical’, from Thraso, the braggart of the Roman comedy. Cervantes has given us ‘quixotic’; Swift ‘lilliputian’; to Molière the French language owes ‘tartuffe’ and ‘tartufferie’. ‘Reynard’ too, which with us is a duplicate for fox, while in the French ‘renard’ has quite excluded the older ‘volpils’, was originally not the name of a kind, but the proper name of the fox-hero, the vulpine Ulysses, in that famous beast-epic of the middle ages, _Reineke Fuchs_; the immense popularity of which we gather from many evidences, from none more clearly than from this. ‘Chanticleer’ is in like manner the proper name of the cock, and ‘Bruin’ of the bear in the same poem{100}. These have not made fortune to the same extent of actually putting out in any language the names which before existed, but still have become quite familiar to us all. We must not count as new words properly so called, although they may delay us for a minute, those comic words, most often comic combinations formed at will, and sometimes of enormous length, in which, as plays and displays of power, great writers ancient and modern have delighted. These for the most part are meant to do service for the moment, and then to pass away{101}. The inventors of them had themselves no intention of fastening them permanently on the language. Thus among the Greeks Aristophanes coined μελλονικιάω, to loiter like Nicias, with allusion to the delays with which this prudent commander sought to put off the disastrous Sicilian expedition, with not a few other familiar to every scholar. The humour of them sometimes consists in their enormous length, as in the ἀμφιπτολεμοπηδησίστρατος of Eupolis; the σπερμαγοραιολεκιθολαχανόπωλις of Aristophanes; sometimes in their mingled observance and transgression of the laws of the language, as in the ‘oculissimus’ of Plautus, a comic superlative of ‘oculus’; ‘occisissimus’ of ‘occisus’; as in the ‘dosones’, ‘dabones’, which in Greek and in medieval Latin were names given to those who were ever promising, ever saying “I will give” but never performing their promise. Plautus with his exuberant wit, and exulting in his mastery and command of the Latin language, will compose four or five lines consisting entirely of comic combinations thrown off for the occasion{102}. Of the same character is Butler’s ‘cynarctomachy’, or battle of a dog and bear.