famous book, at once grammar and vocabulary, and may be considered as the earliest dictionary of a modern language, in French as well as in English. It was reprinted in 1852 at the expense of the French Government in the series of publications entitled ‘Collection de documents inédits sur l'histoire de France, publiés par les soins du Ministre de l'Instruction Publique, Deuxième Série—Histoire des Lettres et des Sciences.’ It is a trite saying that ‘they do these things better in France’; but it is, nevertheless, sometimes true. Amid all the changes of government which France has seen in modern

times, it has never been forgotten that the history of the French language, and of French letters and French science, is part of the history of France; the British government has not even now attained to the standpoint of recognizing this: among the historical documents published under the direction of the authorities of the Record Office, there is no series illustrating the history of the language, the literature, or the science of England.

Next to French, the continental languages most important to Englishmen in the sixteenth century, were Italian and Spanish, of both of which, accordingly, dictionaries were published before the end of the century[7]. In 1599 Richard Percevall, Gent., published his dictionary in Spanish and English; and in the same year ‘resolute John Florio’ (who in his youth resided in Worcester Place, Oxford, and was matriculated at Magdalen College in 1581) brought out his Italian-English Dictionary, the World of Words, which he re-published in a much enlarged form in 1611, with dedication to the Queen of James I, as Queen Anna's New World of Words. This year, also, Randall Cotgrave published his famous French-English Dictionary, which afterwards passed through

so many editions. In the absence as yet of any merely English dictionary, the racy English vocabulary of Florio and Cotgrave is of exceeding value, and has been successfully employed in illustrating the contemporary language of Shakspere, to whom Florio, patronized as he was by the Earls of Southampton and Pembroke, was probably personally known. Thus, the same year which saw England provided with the version of the Bible which was to be so intimately identified with the language of the next three centuries, saw her also furnished with adequate dictionaries of French, Italian, and Spanish; and, in 1617, a still more ambitious work was accomplished by John Minsheu in the production of a polyglot dictionary of English with ten other languages, British or Welsh, Low Dutch, High Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, which he entitled ‘Ηγεμων εις τας γλωσσας, id est Ductor in Linguas, the Guide into Tongues.’

But though in these works there is necessarily contained much of the material of an English dictionary, so that we can from them recover most of the current vocabulary, no one appears before the end of the sixteenth century to have felt that Englishmen could want a dictionary to help them to the knowledge and correct use of their own language. That language was either an in-born faculty, or it was inhaled with their native air, or imbibed with their mothers' milk; how could they need a book to teach them to speak their mother-tongue? To the scholars of the Renascence the notion would

have seemed absurd—as absurd as it has seemed to some of their descendants in the nineteenth century, that an English grammar-school or an English university should trouble itself about such aboriginal products of the English skull, as English language and literature. But by the end of the sixteenth century, as by the end of the nineteenth, there was a moving of the waters: the Renascence of ancient learning had itself brought into English use thousands of learned words, from Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and other languages, ‘ink-horn terms,’ as they were called by Bale and by Puttenham, unknown to, and not to be imbibed from, mother or grandmother. A work exhibiting the spelling, and explaining the meaning, of these new-fangle ‘hard words’ was the felt want of the day; and the first attempt to supply it marks, on the whole, the most important point in the evolution of the modern English Dictionary.

In 1604, Robert Cawdrey, who had been a schoolmaster at Okeham, and afterwards at Coventry, published a modest octavo of 120 pages, 5½ inches by 3½, calling itself The Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words, in which he set forth the proper spelling and meaning of some 3,000 of these learned terms; his work reached a third edition in 1612[8]. In 1616, Dr. John Bullokar, then resident in Chichester, followed with a work of the same kind and size, named by him An English Expositor, of which numerous editions

came out, one as late as 1684. And in 1623 appeared the work which first assumed the title of ‘The English Dictionarie,’ by H.C., Gent. H.C., we learn from the dedication, was Henry Cockeram, to whom John Ford the dramatist addressed the following congratulatory lines:—

To my industrious friend, the Author of this English Dictionarie,
MR. HENRY COCKRAM OF EXETER.

Borne in the West? liue there? so far from Court?

From Oxford, Cambridge, London? yet report

(Now in these daies of Eloquence) such change

Of words? vnknown? vntaught? tis new and strange.

Let Gallants therefore skip no more from hence

To Italic, France, Spaine, and with expence

Waste time and faire estates, to learne new fashions

Of complementall phrases, soft temptations

To glorious beggary: Here let them hand

This Booke; here studie, reade, and vnderstand:

Then shall they find varietie at Home,

As curious as at Paris, or at Rome.

For my part I confesse, hadst not thou writ,

I had not beene acquainted with more wit

Than our old English taught; but now I can

Be proud to know I have a Countryman

Hath strugled for a fame, and what is more,

Gain'd it by paths of Art, vntrod before.

The benefit is generall; the crowne

Of praise particular, and thats thine owne.

What should I say? thine owne deserts inspire thee,

Twere base to enuie, I must then admire thee.

A friend and louer of thy paines,
IOHN FORD.

And a deeply interesting little book is this diminutive ancestor of the modern English Dictionary, to describe which adequately would take far more time than the limits of this lecture afford. It is divided into three parts: Part I contains the hard words with their

explanation in ordinary language; and instructive it is to see what words were then considered hard and unknown. Many of them certainly would be so still: as, for example, abgregate, ‘to lead out of the flock’; acersecomick, ‘one whose hair was never cut’; adcorporated, ‘married’; adecastick, ‘one that will do just howsoever’; bubulcitate, ‘to cry like a cow-boy’; collocuplicate, ‘to enrich’—concerning which we wonder who used them, or where Cockeram found them; but we are surprised to find among these hard words abandon, abhorre, abrupt, absurd, action, activitie, and actresse, explained as ‘a woman doer,’ for the stage actress had not yet appeared. Blunder, ‘to bestir oneself,’ and Garble, ‘to clense things from dust,’ remind us that the meanings of words are subject to change. The Second Part contains