But we may look long in vain for the like of this passage, taken from the crudest and feeblest work of Marlowe, in the wide and wordy expanse of King Edward III.
[{247}] A pre-Shakespearean word of single occurrence in a single play of Shakespeare’s, and proper to the academic school of playwrights.
[{248}] The First Part of Tamburlaine the Great, Act v. Sc. ii.
[{252}] It may be worth a remark that the word power is constantly used as a dissyllable; another note of archaic debility or insufficiency in metre.
[{255}] Yet another essentially non-Shakespearean word, though doubtless once used by Shakespeare; this time a most ungraceful Gallicism.
[{256}] It may obviate any chance of mistake if I observe that here as elsewhere, when I mention the name that is above every name in English literature, I refer to the old Shakespeare, and not to “the new Shakspere”; a novus homo with whom I have no acquaintance, and with whom (if we may judge of a great—or a little—unknown after the appearance and the bearing of those who select him as a social sponsor for themselves and their literary catechumens) I can most sincerely assert that I desire to have none.
[{261}] Surely, for sweet’st we should read swift’st.
[{262a}] This word occurs but once in Shakespeare’s plays—
And speaking it, he wistly looked on me;
(King Richard II. Act v. Sc. 4.)
and in such a case, as in the previous instances of the words invocate and endamagement, a mere απαξ λεyομενον can carry no weight of evidence with it worth any student’s consideration.