That a separation into two would have a very strong claim to preference, may be maintained for these reasons:

1. Upon the unquestionable fact, that, by a division of labour, the several works would be better performed.

2. That those who are scientific and not literary, or who are literary and not scientific, might want the one and not the other: that, if there be but one book, to obtain what they do want, they must encumber themselves with what they do not: if there be two, one or both may be procured.

These appear to be sound and sufficient reasons against the union. In the mean time, I can only add that all the powers in my possession, all the means which I could control and manage in the exertion of them, have been held in requisition, and devoted to the performance of my own work. Another Dictionary of other words, must be the labour of another and a younger hand.*

With these impressions, I feel little disposed to offer upon this head any excuse for inconsistency and incompleteness. My sins of omissions must be ascribed to necessity on my part, and to a conviction that they ought to be supplied from another quarter. My sins of commission may be excused, because I have been the only sufferer; the public are gainers by the surplusage or over-measure: and my acts and deeds, exhibited in proper place, may be regarded as patterns to follow, not examples to shun.

I have left the orthography and accentuation as I found them; though a few errors in the former, and some old usages in the latter, have been noted as they passed. Our antient authors (as Mr. Nares very truly observes) were so careless of Orthography, that it is not uncommon, in some of their writings, to find the same word spelt more ways than one in the course of a single page. In authors, more antient than he seems to have been acquainted with, this indifference may be found apparent in the very same sentence. There have been systems formed for an entire reformation, but all have perished. Johnson, who found our mode of writing to his time unsettled and fortuitous, reduced our vocabulary to some degree of uniformity, and I have already expressed my opinion of his success. Much may yet be done, without rendering the practice of preceding times obscure or unintelligible, and in the proper places will be found such improvements suggested, as seemed to be practicable without violent change.

Opus exegi.-Plura et meliora faciat, qui potest. Ego, qui nec ab ætate, nec a fortuna vires sumere possum, in posterum libens abstinebo, moniti memor antiqui; Solve senescentem. Wachter. Epilogus.

† A few unintended omissions are supplied at the end of the 2nd volume, among which will be found the wordRETROSPECT.

The grammarian and the lexicographer have some duties in common, and there are some peculiar to each. The Dictionary has been confined within its own province. A complete History of the Language must be the work of their combined labours; that portion, which it is incumbent upon the lexicographer to perform, has already been insisted upon as a charac teristic feature of this book; that which falls within the duties of the grammarian, the grammarian has yet to accomplish.

+

ӨАЛАТТА, ӨАЛАТТА.

I AM now approached to the final close of a work, which has occupied a large and important measure of my life. In the succession of years, during which I have been thus pursuing my slow but ceaseless journey, many of those, who, cotemporary with myself, had engaged in contributing to the construction of the Encyclopædia, men younger, and with a fair promise rather of reading my name in the daily notices of the dead, than of having their own perused by me, have dropped into the grave. Many, too, in closer and dearer connection have ceased to watch my progress, and confirm me in moments of weariness and depression. I have never been allowed to dismiss from memory, had I been inclined to do so, the premonition, which was forced upon my mind at the very outset of my career;-That the labours of the three chiefs of Etymological renown, who from the first to the last were to become my inseparable associates, were posthumous. That the Latin Etymologicon of Vossius was dedicated by his son to a friend of the father, as a work-jam olim a parente tibi promissum; that, for the English Etymologicon of Skinner, we are indebted to an anonymous friend; that Junius was ushered into the world under the editorial protection of Lye;-and that, moreover, the Saxon and Gothic Lexicon of Lye was destined to receive the same superintendent care from the hand of his Biographer Manning. Their productions, however, were happily in a state, or nearly so, fit for publication; but the Author of the Diversions of Purley has not left behind him any unwrought fragments to mitigate the sorrow, which every scholar must experience, that the hours of his twilight were suffered to expire in darkness, if not wholly unemployed, yet insufficiently directed to the completion of his work.

No man will now harbour any fear of degradation in the ranks of literature, because he has devoted his portion of ability and learning to the drudgery of a Dictionary: he will remember that Johnson for some years laboured to establish his name in the catalogue of Lexicographers;

and that the Philosopher of Wimbledon was known to have made some preparations for assuming the same character. But the Composer of this Dictionary may be arraigned for a vain glorious estimate of himself, his studies, and his book, if he ventures to express a sympathy in the feelings with which the Great Historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire describes himself to have been filled, when he had penned the last page of his immortal volumes. In some of his emotions I may be allowed to participate: not assuredly in the proud sentiment of established fame, and independent fortune: yet very sincerely in the consciousness, that, whatever may be the fate of the work, the life of the author must be short and precarious. I take leave, as he did, of an old, though I cannot add at all times an agreeable, companion. But, as the exercise of our faculties, either of body or mind, is a main ingredient in the constitution of human happiness, I should, I confess, if, like the historian, I were about to take an everlasting farewell of my book, scarcely possess the power to do so without some suggestions that might compel me to falter between gladness and regret. An English Dictionary, a Dictionary of any living language, is, however, a work so peculiarly calculated to invite, and even to exact, from its author the benefits of supervisal, that the fault will be my own, and the penalty also, if I allow my spirits to sink under the pressure of idleness. Beyond this exertion, however, my expectations do not pretend.

In conclusion-I cannot forbear to remark, that however toilsome in general, and however unproductive in part, may be the labours endured in the collection and arrangement of the materials for an English Dictionary, the Author of it has it in his power, at the present æra, to congratulate himself upon the enjoyment of a prospect, much more rich and spacious than could fall to the lot of the compiler of a similar work in any Language of the European Continent :—

The world is all before him.

And, perhaps, no subject of philosophic contemplation, possessing a livelier interest, can be proposed to a thoughtful and enlightened mind: than a comparison of the field of renown, which even 240 years ago was sketched by the graphic powers of a very humble poet of our own country, with that over which the more lofty genius of the Roman Lyric bard extended its survey. When the former imagined himself soaring on wing, "non usitata, nec tenui,” he prescribes the shores of the Bosphorus, the Syrtes of Getulia, and the Hyperborean plains, to be the utmost confines of his flight; he was content that the Colchian and the Dacian should become familiar with his name, and that the "peritus Iber, Rhodanique potor" should rehearse his song. Our Poet, Daniel, animated probably by the spirit of discovery and general enter

See the lines from him prefixed to this Preface.

prize, for which the princes of the house of Tudor, and the illustrious men, who adorned that period of our history are so distinguished, depictures to his fancy far more ample and resplendent scenes of glory: not, indeed, in personal exultation, for the offspring of his own muse especially, but in patriotic pride, for the language in which he wrote.

These scenes are no longer imaginary: "The treasures of our tongue" are spread over continents, scattered among islands in the Northern and the Southern Hemisphere, from the "unformed occident, to the strange shores of unknowing nations in the East." The sun, indeed, now never sets upon the Empire of Great Britain. Not one hour of the twenty-four, in which the earth completes her diurnal revolution; not one round of the minute hand of the dial is allowed to pass, in which on some portion of the surface of the globe, the air is not filled with "accents that are ours." They are heard in the ordinary transactions of life; or in the administration of law, or in the deliberations of the senate house or council chamber; in the offices of private devotion, or in the public observance of the rites and duties of a common faith. Such being the facts, upon which Englishmen may delight to dwell, I may myself be suffered to avow a peculiar gratification in the plan upon which this Dictionary has been composed. It is a copious and careful record of the Language from its earliest state; it contains the choicest sentiments of English wisdom, poetry, and eloquence; it may be deemed a supplial of many books; and as such merely it may be estimated at higher worth in foreign climes than on its native shores. At the very moment, when I am concluding this final page, I have reason to believe that the early portions of these volumes have found a resting place upon the tables of an English Settler on the banks of La Plata: I am assured that they are admitted to relieve the languor of military inaction at the Mess of Abednuggar; and that they have already found employment for the acuteness of nearly a century of critics in the United States of North America.

April, 1837.