the ordinary words ‘explained’ by their hard equivalents, and is intended to teach a learned style. The plain man or gentlewoman may write a letter in his or her natural language, and then by turning up the simple words in the dictionary alter them into their learned equivalents. Thus ‘abound’ may be altered into exuperate, ‘too great plenty’ into uberty, ‘he and I are of one age’ into we are coetaneous, ‘youthful babbling’ into juvenile inaniloquence—a useful expression to hurl at an opponent in the Oxford Union.

The last part is the most entertaining of all: it is headed ‘The Third Part, treating of Gods and Goddesses, Men and Women, Boyes and Maides, Giants and Diuels, Birds and Beasts, Monsters and Serpents, Wells and Riuers, Herbes, Stones, Trees, Dogges,

Fishes, and the like’; it is a key to the allusions to classical, historical, mythological, and other marvellous persons, animals, and things, to be met with in polite literature. A good example of its contents is the well-known article on the Crocodile:—

Crocodile, a beast hatched of an egge, yet some of them grow to a great bignesse, as 10. 20. or 30. foot in length: it hath cruell teeth and scaly back, with very sharpe clawes on his feete: if it see a man afraid of him, it will eagerly pursue him, but on the contrary, if he be assaulted he wil shun him. Hauing eaten the body of a man, it will weepe ouer the head, but in fine eate the head also: thence came the Prouerb, he shed Crocodile teares, viz., fayned teares.

Appreciation of Cockeram's ‘Dictionarie’ was marked by the numerous editions through which it passed down as late as 1659. Meanwhile Thomas Blount, Barrister of the Inner Temple, and correspondent of Anthony à Wood, was devoting the leisure hours of twenty years to his ‘Glossographia: or a Dictionary interpreting all such hard words, whether Hebrew, Greek, Latin,’ etc., ‘as are now used in our refined English Tongue,’ of which the first edition saw the light in 1656.

I suppose it is a truism, that the higher position now taken by English studies, is intimately interwoven with the advances which have been made during the last quarter of a century in the higher education of women, and that but for the movement to let women share in the advantages of a university education, it is doubtful whether the nineteenth century would have witnessed the establishment of a School of English Language and Literature at Oxford. In connexion

with this it is a noteworthy fact, that the preparation of these early seventeenth century English dictionaries was also largely due to a consideration of the educational wants of women. The ‘Table Alphabeticall’ of Robert Cawdrey, which was dedicated to five ‘right honourable, Worshipfull, vertuous, and godlie Ladies[9],’ the sisters of his former pupil, Sir James Harrington, Knight, bears on its title-page that it is ‘gathered for the benefit and help of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other vnskilfull persons.’ Bullokar's Expositor was dedicated ‘to the Right Honorable and Vertvovs his Singvlar Good Ladie, the Ladie Jane Viscountesse Mountague,’ under whose patronage he hoped to see the work ‘perhaps gracefully admitted among greatest Ladies and studious Gentlewomen, to whose reading (I am made belieue) it will not prooue altogether vngratefull.’ In similar words, the title-page of Cockeram's Dictionary proclaims its purpose of ‘Enabling as well Ladies and Gentlewomen ... as also Strangers of any Nation to the vnderstanding of the more difficult Authors already printed in our Language, and the more speedy attaining of an elegant perfection of the English tongue, both in reading, speaking, and writing.’ And Thomas Blount, setting forth the purpose of his Glossographia, says, in words of which one seems to have heard an echo in reference

to an English School in this University, ‘It is chiefly intended for the more-knowing Women, and less-knowing Men; or indeed for all such of the unlearned, who can but finde in an Alphabet the word they understand not.’

It is noticeable that all these references to the needs of women disappear from the later editions, and are wanting in later dictionaries after 1660; whether this was owing to the fact that the less-knowing women had now come upsides with the more-knowing men; or that with the Restoration, female education went out of fashion, and women sank back again into elegant illiteracy, I leave to the historian to discover; I only, as a lexicographer, record the fact that from the Restoration the dictionaries are silent about the education of women, till we pass the Revolution settlement and reach the Age of Queen Anne, when J.K. in 1702 tells us that his dictionary is ‘chiefly designed for the benefit of young Scholars, Tradesmen, Artificers, and the female sex, who would learn to spell truely.’

Blount's Glossographia went through many editions down to 1707; but two years after its appearance, Edward Phillips, the son of Milton's sister Anne, published his New World of Words, which Blount with some reason considered to be largely plagiarized from his book. He held his peace, however, until Phillips brought out a Law-Dictionary or Nomothetes, also largely copied from his own Nomo-lexicon, when he could refrain himself no longer, and burst upon the world with his indignant pamphlet, ‘A World of Errors

discovered in the New World of Words, and in Nomothetes or the Interpreter,’ in which he exhibits the proofs of Phillips's cribbing, and makes wild sport of the cases in which his own errors and misprints had either been copied or muddled by his plagiarist. The latter did not vouchsafe a reply; he knew a better plan; he quietly corrected in his next edition the mistakes which Blount had so conveniently pointed out, and his ‘New World of Words,’ furnished with an engraved frontispiece, containing views of Oxford and Cambridge, and portraits of some Oxford and Cambridge scholars, lived on in successive editions as long as Blount's.

Time and space forbid me even to recount the later dictionaries of this class and period; we need only mention that of Elisha Coles, a chorister and subsequently matriculated student of Magdalen College (of which his uncle, Elisha Coles, was steward under the Commonwealth), a meritorious work which passed through numerous editions down to 1732; and that of Edward Cocker, the celebrated arithmetician and writing-master of St. George's, Southwark, by whom people still sometimes asseverate ‘according to Cocker.’ This was published after his death, ‘from the author's correct copy,’ by John Hawkins, in 1704, with a portrait of the redoubtable Cocker himself in flowing wig and gown, and the following lines:—

COCKER, who in fair writing did excell,

And in Arithmetic perform'd as well,

This necessary work took next in hand,

That Englishmen might English understand.

The last edition of Phillips' New World of Words was edited after his death, with numerous additions, by John Kersey, son of John Kersey the mathematician. Two years later Kersey threw the materials into another form and published it in an octavo, as Kersey's ‘Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, or a General English Dictionary,’ of which three editions appeared before 1721. In this work there are included a considerable number of obsolete words, chiefly from Spenser and his contemporaries, marked O., and in some cases erroneously explained. Professor Skeat has pointed out that this was the source of Chatterton's Elizabethan vocabulary, and that he took the obsolete words, which he attributed to Rowley, erroneous explanations and