It can readily be imagined that the restless activity which these little symptoms betoken had a remarkable effect in altering, developing, and indeed modernizing, the English vocabulary. The genius of the language sprouted and burgeoned in the genial warmth of Elizabethan and Jacobean fancy, and—most effective of all—it passed through the fire of Shakespeare’s imagination. There is an unobtrusiveness about Shakespeare’s enormous influence on his native tongue which sometimes recalls the records of his private life. This is no doubt partly due to the very popularity of his plays, which has preserved the direct influence in every age. Where the word which he employs is a new one, it has usually become so common in the course of years that we find it hard to conceive of the time when it was not. Where it is a meaning or a shade of meaning which he has added, as likely as not that very shade was the one most familiar to our own childhood before we had ever read a line of his poetry. Phrases and whole lines from the plays and sonnets are as much a part of the English vocabulary as individual words. Such are _pitched battle_, _play on words_, _give him his due_, _well on your way_, _too much of a good thing_, _to the manner born_, _the glass of fashion_, _snapper-up of unconsidered trifles_, _more honoured in the breach than the observance_,... The influence of such a mind on the language in which it expresses itself can only be compared to the effect of high temperatures on solid matter. As imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, each molecule of suggestiveness contained in each word gains a mysterious freedom from its neighbours; the old images move to and fro distinctly in the listener’s fancy, and when the sound has died away, not merely the shape, but what seemed to be the very substance of the word has been readjusted. Examples are found readily enough with the help of a volume of Shakespeare and the _Oxford Dictionary_. As to new words themselves, it has been said that there are more in Shakespeare’s plays than in all the rest of the English poets put together. _Advantageous_, _amazement_, _critic_ and _critical_, _dishearten_, _dwindle_, _generous_, _invulnerable_, _majestic_, _obscene_, _pedant_, _pious_, _radiance_, _reliance_, and _sanctimonious_ are a few examples, but it is still more interesting to trace the subtler part of his influence. As an instance of what we may call his literary alertness let us take the word _propagate_. It is not found in English before 1570, and is thus a new word in Shakespeare’s time. Yet he handles it four times, now literally, now figuratively, with as much ease and grace as if it had been one of the oldest words in the language. Listen to Romeo: Griefs of mine own lie heavy in my breast, Which thou wilt propagate, to have it prest With more of thine.