Will it be said that words become more vivid and picturesque,--that we get a firmer and more vigorous grasp of their meaning,--when, as Coleridge advises, we present to our minds the visual images that form their primary meanings? The reply is, that long use deadens us to the susceptibility of such images, and in not one case in a thousand, probably, are they noticed. How many college graduates think of a “miser” as being etymologically a “miserable” man, of a “savage” as one living in “a wood,” or of a “desultory” reader as one who leaps from one study to another, as a circus rider leaps from horse to horse? A distinguished poet once confessed that the Latin _imago_ first suggested itself to him as the root of the English word “imagination” when, after having been ten years a versifier, he was asked by a friend to define this most important term in the critical vocabulary of his art. “We have had to notice over and over again,” says Mr. Whitney in his late work on “The Life and Growth of Language,” “the readiness on the part of language-users to forget origins, to cast aside as cumbrous rubbish the etymological suggestiveness of a term, and concentrate force upon the new and more adventitious tie. This is one of the most fundamental and valuable tendencies in name-making; it constitutes an essential part of the practical availability of language.”
If a knowledge of Greek and Latin is necessary to him who would command all the resources of our tongue, how comes it that the most consummate mastery of the English language is exhibited by Shakespeare? Will it be said that his writings prove him to have been a classical scholar; that they abound in facts and allusions which imply an intimate acquaintance with the masterpieces of Greek and Roman literature? We answer that this is a palpable begging of the question. By the same reasoning we can prove that scores of English authors, who, we know positively, never read a page of Latin or Greek, were, nevertheless, classical scholars. By similar logic we can prove that Shakespeare followed every calling in life. Lawyers vouch for his acquaintance with law; physicians for his skill in medicine; mad-doctors for his knowledge of the phenomena of mental disease; naturalists assert positively, from the internal evidence of his works, that he was a botanist and an entomologist; bishops, that he was a theologian; and claims have been put forth for his dexterity in cutting up sheep and bullocks. Ben Jonson tells us that he had “small Latin and less Greek”; another contemporary, that he had “little Latin and no Greek.” “Small Latin,” indeed, it must have been which a youth could have acquired in his position, who married and entered upon the duties of active life at eighteen. The fact that translations were abundant in the poet’s time, and that all the literature of that day was steeped in classicism, will fully account for Shakespeare’s knowledge of Greek and Roman history, as well as for the classical turns of expression which we find in his plays.