Quite recently it was suggested by the writer of an article in the Spectator that Shakespeare was now but little read,—that while his works were quoted from as much as ever, the quotations¹ were obtained at second hand, and that it would be hard to find to-day any reader who had waded³ through all that wonderful collection of plays and poems. This is surely not a carefully made statement. If there were any amount of truth in it, we might well regard such a state of things as only one degree less deplorable than that people should have ceased to read the Bible. For next to the Bible there can be no such collection of writings available wherein may be found food for every mind. Even the sailor, critical as he always is of allusions⁵ to the technicalities of his calling that appear in literature, is arrested by the truth of Shakespeare’s references to the sea and seafaring, while he cannot but wonder at their copiousness⁶ in the work of a thorough landsman. Of course, in this respect it is necessary to remember that Elizabethan England spoke⁷ a language which was far more frequently studded with sea-terms than that which we speak ashore⁸ to-day. With all our vast commerce and our utter dependence⁹ upon the sea for our very life; its romance, its expressions take little hold of the immense majority of the people. Therein we differ widely from Americans. In every walk of life, from Maine to Mexico, from Philadelphia to San Francisco, the American people salt their speech with terms borrowed from the sailor, as they do also with other terms used by Shakespeare, and often considered by Shakespeare’s countrymen of the present day, quite wrongly, to be slang.