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PREFACE.

SHAKESPEARE'S works are a library in themselves. A poor lad, possessing no other book, might, on this single one, make himself a gentleman and a scholar. A poor girl, studying no other volume, might become a lady in heart and soul. Knowledge, refinement, experience in men and manners, are to be gathered from his pages in plenary abundance. An illustrious patriot, in exile, learned to plead for the rights of his country, and to urge her wrongs, in a tongue which should interpret his teeming ideas through. eloquent words to those nations that might aid her, from diligent study of those nations' poet-Shakespeare. The noble Hungarian-whom nature had gifted with oratorical powers-made them available in urging upon British and American hearts the bleeding cause of his native land, by assiduous culture of Shakespeare's language, taking him as his text-book and sole instructor. Shakespeare's words were the vocabulary, Shakespeare's diction was the rhetoric, which sent forth from the Kutayah prison one of the most accomplished orators that ever addressed hearers in their British mothertongue. To cite another instance: the most brilliant wit, the most sparkling writer, the most spirited reparteeist of our own day adopted Shakespeare as his chief author while a youth and to the admiring devotion with which he imbued himself with the poet's productions, may be attributed that fine intellectual strength which gave "Black-eyed Susan" and the "Rent-Day" to the world, from the pen of a lad under age; and the "Chronicles of Clovernook" and "St Giles and St James," as the efforts of his vigorous maturity.

Shakespeare may be taken as a standard for language; it is manly, expressive, and purely English. The revival of many of Shakespeare's words-pronounced by Dr Johnson in his dictionary to be "wholly obsolete "—would be a valuable renovation of the English language. In the present rage for fineries of epithet and fopperies of phraseology, when French terms and Greek titles are so much in vogue, it would be a wholesome return to indigenous form of speech were we to abide by Shakespeare's integrity. Instead of framing new-fangled and alien nomenclature, let us maintain the use of Shakespeare's right and true words, and we shall preserve our language in its purity. His is genuine Saxon English: his classical adoptions are sparingly introduced, and only with strictest propriety to the occasion.

Shakespeare affords a good standard for taste-a standard by which to gauge true taste, and estimate false taste. Much is said about this being "bad taste," and that being "too sentimental ;"—and so, people—especially young people, in their honest eagerness-rush into the opposite extreme, and, in striving to escape from these, abjure really tasteful things, and things of pure sentiment. Shakespeare will

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