PE 5^*: v ~W" 1 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. No. Tn, g UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. H J s> ON SOME DEFICIENCIES IN OUR ENGLISH DICTIONARIES, ON SOME DEFICIENCIES IN OUR ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. BEING THE SUBSTANCE OF TWO PAPEES READ BEFORE THE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY, KOV. 5, AND NOV. TQ, 1 85 7. BY RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, D.D. BEAN OE WESTMINSTER. LONDON: JOHN W. PARKER AND SON, WEST STRAND. 1857. tONDOK: SAVTLL AITD EDWABDS, EEINTEES, CHAKDOS STBEET, COVEITT GABDEW, ON SOME DEFICIENCIES IN OUE ENGLISH DICTIONAEIES. THE course which was adopted by the Philological Society at the conclusion of its last session, with a view of re- moving some of the imperfections, and supplying some of the deficiencies, of our English Dictionaries, is known to many, probably to nearly all of its members. Many, too, are aware of the general acceptance with which the scheme has been received, as one at once practical and full of promise ; of the large amount of co-operation which has been freeiy tendered both from members of the Society and from others, so that we may reasonably hope that the results will not fall short of expectation. Taking a lively interest in this effort, I have asked permission to read a paper which will enter somewhat more fully into the subject of the omissions needing to be supplied, than was possible in the necessarily brief statement circulated a few months ago ; which will also confirm the assertions therein made by a certain number of proofs ; as many as those brief limits of time, by which I also am shut in, will allow. At the same time let me before commencing make one observation. Some of those willing to co-operate in this scheme have already transmitted to the Secretary the first instalments of their work, the result of their investigations up to the present time. He will probably ere long lay before 2 ON SOME DEFICIENCIES IN you some specimens of these the first-fruits of that harvest which we hope to gather in. I have, however, thought it right to abstain from looking at any portion of these, partly as being unwilling even to seem to employ for a private end contributions made for a more public object ; but with the further advantage, that I am thus able to shew, that it needs no such combined effort of many to make palpable our deficiencies, however it may need this to remove them ; but that any one who is not merely and altogether a guest and stranger in our earlier literature, has in his power to bring forward abundant evidence even from his single, and it may be slenderly furnished treasure-house, of the large omissions which it is desirable to supply. The plan which I propose to follow in treating my subject will be this. Remembering the excellent maxim of the Schoolmen, Generalia non pungunt, I shall deal as little as possible with these generals, shall enter as much as I can into particulars in proof of my assertion. Such a course, indeed, will be attended with a certain inconvenience, which is this : the fact that the vocabulary of our Dictionaries is seriously deficient can only be shown by an accumulation of evidence, each several part of which is small and com- paratively insignificant in itself; only deriving weight and importance from the circumstance that it is one of a multi- tude of like proofs ; while yet it will be impossible within the limits of one paper, or even of two, to bring more than comparatively a very small portion of this evidence before you. Neither my limits, nor your patience, would admit of more. This inconvenience, however, I cannot avoid. Even as it is, I fear I shall put your patience to the trial. Per- haps I shall make the smallest demands upon it at all consistent with my subject, by grouping the materials which I wish to present to you according to the following arrange- ment. Our Dictionaries then appear to me deficient in the following points ; I do not say that there are not other OUR ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 3 points likewise, but to these I would desire at present to direct your attention. I. Obsolete words are incompletely registered; some in- serted, some not; with no reasonable rule adduced for the omission of these, the insertion of those other. II. Families or groups of words are often imperfect, some members of a family inserted, while others are omitted. III. Oftentimes much earlier examples of the employ- ment of words exist than any which our Dictionaries have cited ; indicating that they were earlier introduced into the language than these examples would imply; and in case of words now obsolete, much later, frequently marking their currency at a period long after that when we are left to suppose that they passed out of use. IV. Important meanings and uses of words are passed over ; sometimes the later alone given, while the earlier, without which the history of words will be often maimed and incomplete, or even unintelligible, are unnoticed. V. Comparatively little attention is paid to the distin- guishing of synonymous words. VI. Many passages in our literature are passed by, which might be usefully adduced in illustration of the first intro- duction, etymology, and meaning of words. VII. And lastly, our Dictionaries err in redundancy as well as in defect, in the too much as well as the too little ; all of them inserting some things, and some of them many things, which have properly no claim to find room in their pages. Such are the principal shortcomings which I find in those books on which we must ever chiefly rely in seeking to obtain a knowledge of our native tongue. I must detain you one moment before I proceed to my proofs, and I will employ that moment in expressing my earnest trust that nothing which I shall say may even seem inconsistent with the highest respect, admiration, and honour, for the labourers, whether living or dead, in this field of English B 2 4 ON SOME DEFICIENCIES IN lexicography. It is comparatively easy to pick a hole here, or to detect a flaw there ; to point out stones, it may be many stones, in the way, which ought to have been built up into the wall; but such edifices as our great English Dictionaries could only have been reared by enormous labour, patience, and skill : and the same somewhat close examination which detects these little blemishes, and dis- covers these omissions, which shews us, what we might have guessed before, namely, that they underlie the infirmity common to all other works of man's hands, does to a far greater extent make us conscious how vast the amount is of that labour, patience, and skill which they embody. To come, then, now to my proofs. And yet before these proofs can be considered to prove anything, I must ask you to be at one with me in regard of what the true idea of a Dictionary is, what it ought to include, and what to exclude. If we are not agreed in this, much that is adduced may seem beside the mark. I will state, then, very briefly what my idea of a Dictionary is, hoping to find that it is also yours ; and if not, endeavouring to persuade you to make it yours, as that which on fuller deliberation alone commends itself to your minds. A Dictionary, then, according to that idea of it which seems to me alone capable of being logically maintained, is an inventory of the language : much more indeed, but this primarily, and with this only at present we will deal. It is no task of the maker of it to select the good words of a language. If he fancies that it is so, and begins to pick and choose, to leave this and to take that, he will at once go astray. The business which he has undertaken is to collect and arrange all the words, whether good or bad, whether they commend themselves to his judgment or otherwise, which, with certain exceptions hereafter to be specified, those writing in the language have employed. He is an historian of it, not a critic. The delectus ver- OUR ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. borum, on which so much, on which nearly everything in style depends, is a matter with which he has no concern. There is a constant confusion here in men's minds. They conceive of a Dictionary as though it had this function, to be a standard of the language ; and the pretensions to be this which the French Dictionary of the Academy sets up, may have helped on this confusion. It is nothing of the kind. A special Dictionary may propose to itself to be such, to include only the words on which the compiler is willing to set the mark of his approval, as being fit, and in his judg- ment the only fit, to be employed by those who would write with purity and taste. Of the probable worth of such a collection I express no opinion. I will only say that I cannot understand how any writer with the smallest confidence in himself, the least measure of that vigour and vitality which would justify him in addressing his countrymen in written or spoken discourse at all, should consent in this matter to let one self-made dictator, or forty, determine for him what words he should use, and what he should forbear from using. At all events, a Dictionary of the English language such a work would not have the slightest pretence to be called. What sort of completeness, or what value, would a Greek lexicon possess, a Scott and Liddell, from whose pages all the words condemned by Phrynichus and the other Greek purists, and, so far as style is concerned, many of them justly condemned, had been dismissed ? The lexi- cographer is making an inventory ; that is his business ; he may think of this article which he inserts in his catalogue, that it had better be consigned to the lumber-room with #11 speed, or of the other, that it only met its deserts when it was so consigned long ago; but his task is to make his inventory complete. Where he counts words to be needless, affected, pedantic, ill put together, contrary to the genius of the language, there is no objection to his saying so; on the contrary, he may do real service in this way: but let b ON SOME DEFICIENCIES IN their claim to belong to our book-language be the humblest, and he is bound to record them, to throw wide with an im- partial hospitality his doors to them, as to all other. A Dictionary is an historical monument, the history of a nation contemplated from one point of view, and the wrong ways into which a language has wandered, or attempted to wander, may be nearly as instructive as the right ones in which it has travelled : as much may be learned, or nearly as much, from its failures as its successes, from its follies as from its wisdom. The maker, for example, of an English Dictionary may not consider ' mulierosity/ 1 or ' subsannation/ 2 or 'coaxation/ 3 or l ludibundness/ 4 or ' delinition/ 5 or c sep- temfluous/ 6 or ' medioxumous/ 7 or l mirificent/ 8 or 'pal- miferous/ 9 or 'opime/ 10 or a thousand other words of a similar character which might be adduced (I take all these from a single work of Henry More), to contribute much to the riches of the English tongue ; yet has he not therefore any right to omit them, as all these which I have just 1 " Both. Gaspar Sanctus and he tax Antiochus for his mulierosity and excess in luxury." — H. More, Mystery of Iniquity , b. 2, c. 10, § 3. 2 " Idolatry is as absolute a subsannation and vilification of God as malice could invent." — Id. ih. b. 1, c. 5, § 11. 3 " The importunate, harsh, and disharmonious coaxations of frogs." — Id. ib. b. 1. c. 6, § 16. 4 " That ludibundness of nature in her gamaieus and such like sportful and ludicrous productions." — Id. ib. b. 1, c. 15, § 14. 5 " The delinition also of the infant's ears and nostrils with the spittle." — Id. ib. b. 1, c. 18, § 7. 6 " The main streams of this septemfluous river [the Nile]." — Id. ib. b. 1, c. 16, § n. 7 " The whole order of the medioxumous or internuntial deities." — Id. ib. b. 1, c. 12, § 6. 8 " Enchantment Agrippa defines to be nothing but the conveyance of a certain mirificent power into the thing enchanted." — Id. ib. b. 1, c. 18, § 3. 9 " The palmiferous company triumphs, and the Heavenly Jerusalem is seen upon earth." — Id. ib. b. 2, c. 6, § 18. 10 "Great and opime preferments and dignities." — Id.ib. b. 2, c. 15, § 3. OUR ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 7 adduced, with a thousand more of like kind, have been omitted from our Dictionaries. 1 I will not urge that one or two in this list might be really serviceable (' mulierosity/ for instance, expresses what no other word in the language would do) ; but admitting them to be purely pedantic, that they would be quite intolerable in use, still they involve and illustrate an important fact in the history of our language, — the endeavour to latinize it to a far greater extent than has actually been done, the refusal on its part to adopt more than a certain number of these Latin candidates for admission into its ranks, — and, therefore, should not be omitted from the archives of the language. If, indeed, the makers of our Dictionaries had, by a like omission, put the same stamp of non-allowance upon all other words of this character, on all which to them seemed pedantic, inconsistent with the true genius of the language, threatening to throw too pre- ponderating a weight into one of its scales, this course, although mistaken, would yet have been consistent. But they have not done so. They all include, and rightly, a multitude of such words. But admitting these, such, for instance, as 'fabulosity/ 'populosity/ 'nidorous/ 'ataraxy/ f exi- conize/ 'diaphaneity/ — admitting these by the hundred, they had forfeited their right, were it only on the ground of consistency, to exclude such as I have just enumerated, not to say that the idea of a Dictionary demands their insertion. It is, let me once more repeat, for those who use a language to sift the bran from the flour, to reject that and retain 1 It may be objected to this statement, that two or three of those above quoted are found in Johnson or in Todd ; they are so ; ' coaxa- tion,' for instance, which the latter defines as " the art of coaxing" ! but they are there without examples of their use ; and though I shall not often refer to such words, when I do I shall deal with them as words wholly wanting in our Dictionaries ; for to me there is no difference between a word absent from a Dictionary, and a word there, but unsus- tained by an authority. Even if Webster's Dictionary were in other respects a better book, the almost total absence of illustrative quota- tions would deprive it of all value in my eyes. 8 ON SOME DEFICIENCIES IN this. They are to be the true Delia Cruscans : this title of furfur atores is a usurpation when assumed by the makers of a Dictionary, and their assumption of it can only serve to show how little they have rightly apprehended the task which they have undertaken. I proceed to support by evidence in each case the several complaints which I have made. I. In regard of obsolete words, our Dictionaries have no certain rule of admission or exclusion. But how, it may be asked, ought they to hold themselves in regard of these ? This question has been already implicitly answered in what was just laid down regarding the all-comprehensive cha- racter which belongs to them. There are some, indeed, who taking up a position a little different from theirs who would have them to contain only the standard words of the language, yet proceeding on the same inadequate view of their object and intention, count that they should aim at presenting the body of the language as now existing ; this and no more ; leaving to archaic glossaries the gathering in of words that are current no longer. But a little reflec- tion will show how untenable is this position; how this rule, consistently followed out, would deprive a Dictionary of a large part of its usefulness. Surely if I am reading Swift, and come on the word 'to brangle/ or light upon 1 druggerman' in Pope, I ought to be able to find them in my Dictionary. Yes, it will perhaps be conceded, we will admit the few archaic words which are met with in writers so recent as Pope and Swift. But then if I find ' palliard' or ' mazer' in Dryden, must I be content to be ignorant of their meaning, unless besides my English Dictionary, I have another of the obsolete English tongue? Dryden's few archaisms, it is allowed, should find place. But I plead then, that in reading Jeremy Taylor I come upon 'dorter/ e spagyrical/ and other words, hard to be understood : surely I may fairly demand that my Dictionary shall help OUR ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 9 me over any verbal difficulties which I may find in Taylor ; and in this way I travel back to Shakespeare, to Spenser, to Gascoigne, to Hawes, to Chaucer, Wiclif, and at length to Piers Ploughman, Robert of Gloucester, or whatever other work is taken as the earliest in our tongue. It is quite impossible with any consistency to make a stand any- where, or to admit any words now obsolete without includ- ing, or at least attempting to include all. What I complain of in our Dictionaries is that they do not accept this necessity, and in its full extent. They all undertake to give the archaisms of the language, but all with certain reservations and exceptions. "Obsolete words," says Johnson, "are admitted when they are found in authors not obsolete, or when they have any force or beauty that may deserve revival/'' I will not pause here to inquire what a lexicographer has to do with the question whether a word deserves revival or not; but rather call your attention to the fact that Johnson does not even observe his own rule of comprehension, imperfect and in- adequate as that is. When the words omitted may be counted by hundreds, I suppose by thousands, it seems absurd, almost a weakening of one's case, to quote two or three, which yet is all that I can undertake to do. I have no choice, however, but to cite these. 'Grimsire/ or 1 grimsir/ I meet everywhere in our old authors, in Mas- singer, in Burton, in Holland, 1 in twenty more, some of them certainly authors not obsolete, but he has not found place for it ; nor yet Richardson. This word, it may be pleaded, presents no great difficulty, though this would be no excuse for its omission; but here is ' hickscorner/ of which the meaning is anything but obvious : (the ' hick- scorner' is the loose ribald scoffer at sacred things) ; this 1 " Even Tiberius Caesar, who otherwise was known iov&grimsir, and the most unsociable and melancholic man in the world, required in that manner to be salved and wished well unto, whensoever he sneezed." — Pliny, vol. 2, p. 297. 10 ON SOME DEFICIENCIES IN word also, of continual recurrence in our old authors/ might be sought for vainly in our Dictionaries. If Milton uses ' jackstraw/ styling Salmasius " an inconsiderable fellow and a jac7cstraw," 2 why should I not know what a ' jack- straw' is, without recurring to some archaic glossary for this knowledge ? They indeed would not help me here, for the word is in none of them. Still less satisfactory is Richardson's rule of admission and exclusion. " Obsolete words," he says, " have been diligently sought for, and all such, but no other, as could contribute any aid to the investigations of etymology, as diligently preserved." But why those only which would " contribute aid to the investigations of etymo- logy?" why not those also which should enable us to measure in its length and breadth the intellectual territory which our English language has occupied as well as that which it occupies now, to form some estimate of its won- derful riches, as in other ways, so also by a contempla- tion of the enormous losses which it has endured without being seriously impoverished thereby ? Why not preserve all those obsolete words which are necessary to enable the student to read his English classics with comfort and with profit? In carrying out his scheme he has often omitted, and not without loss, archaic words which Johnson or Todd has inserted. Thus I observe 'lurry' (a word occur- ring in Milton and Henry More), ' privado' (in Fuller and Jeremy Taylor), and two I just noticed, 'druggerman' and c palliard/ duly registered and explained in their pages, but altogether omitted in his. Sometimes the word thus omitted is very curious. Thus no one of our Dictionaries, and I may say the same of our glossaries, contains the word 'umstroke/ which is yet 1 " What is more common in our days than, when such hicTcscorners will be merry at their drunken banquets, to fall in talk of some one minister or other ?" — Pilkington, Exposition on Nehemiah, c. 2. 2 Preface to The Defence of the People of England. OUR ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 11 most noteworthy, being, as it is, the sole survivor of its kind. For while there is abundant evidence that our early English derived largely from the Anglo-Saxon the use of the preposition 'urn' or * iimbe* (=a//0i) in composition, (thus ' umgang/ ' umhappe/ ' umbeset/ and many more, for which see Halliwell), no single word with this prefix, ex- cepting only this one, has lived on into our later English ; which yet our Dictionaries, as I have said, have not observed, or, observing, have not cared to register. I incline to think they did not observe it ; for while most of Fuller's other works have been diligently used by our lexico- graphers, his Pisgah Sight of Palestine, one of his most curious and most characteristic, and in which ' umstroke , twice occurs, 1 has been, as far as my experience reaches, entirely overlooked by them. Not less curious from the other extreme of the language are the Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, words, which it has been endeavoured to transplant without alteration into English, but which have refused to take root here ; a record of the attempt to transplant which ought not the less to be preserved, while yet often it has not been. Thus Holland sought to introduce Aristotle's KififiiZ,, 2 though certainly our early English was rich enough in words to ex- press what is exprest by this, so rich that we have let drop more than half of them — c snudge/ ' curmudgeon/ ( gripe/ (not in our Dictionaries in this sense, but so used by Burton), ( pinchpenny/ ' clutch fist/ ' penifather/ ( nip- 1 " Such towns as stand (as one may say) on tiptoes, on the very umstroke, or on any part of the utmost line of any map, (unresolved in a manner to stay out or come in), are not to be presumed placed accord- ing to exactness, but only signify them there or thereabouts." — Pt. i, b. i, c. 14 ; cf. pt. 2, b. 5, c. 20. 2 " He that calleth a liberal man, wellknown to spend magnificently, a base mechanical humhix and a pinching penifather, ministereth matter of good sport and laughter to the party whom he seemeth so to challenge or menace." — Plutarch, p. 665. 12 ON SOME DEFICIENCIES IN farthing-/ and many more. For Latin words, ' ardehV 1 figures in Burton, 'semulus' 2 in Drayton, 'rex' in the popular phrase, "to play rex" s or to play the tyrant, but none of these in our Dictionaries. Sylvester, whose works, by the way, are a mine as yet very inadequately wrought for lexicographical purposes, constantly employs the Italian 'farfalla' 4 for butterfly. Let me observe here that provincial or local words stand on quite a different footing from obsolete. We do not com- plain of their omission. In my judgment we should, on the contrary, have a right to complain if they were admitted, and it is an oversight that some of our Dictionaries occa- sionally find room for them, in their avowed character of provincial words ; when indeed, as sucJi, they have no right to a place in a Dictionary of the English tongue. I have placed an emphasis on " as such j" for while this is so, it must never be forgotten that a word may be local or provincial now, which was once current over the whole land. There are many such, which belonging once to the written and spoken language of all England, and having free course through the land, have now fallen from their former state and dignity, have retreated to remoter districts, and there maintain an obscure existence still; citizens once, they are only provincials now. These properly find place in a Dictionary, not, however, in right of what they now are, but of what they orice have been; not because they now survive in some single district, but because they once lived through the whole land. I regret the absence 1 " Striving to get that which we had better be without, ardelios, busy bodies as we are." — Anatomy of Melancholy, pt. I, 2, 7, 7. 2 " As this brave warrior was, so no less dear to us The rival of his fame, his only cumulus." Polyolbion, Song 18. 3 " As helpers of your joy, not to domineer and play rex." — Eogebs, Naaman the Syrian, p. 2 17. 4 "And, new farf alia, in her radiant shine, Too bold, I burn these tender wings of mine." The Magnificence. OUR ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 13 of a number of these from our Dictionaries, and will in- stance a few. ' Spong' is now a Suffolk, or, it may be, an East Anglian, word. Halliwell deals with it as thus provincial, and rightly describes it as " an irregular narrow and projecting part of a field;" corresponding, therefore, very nearly to the t sling/ 1 slang/ or 'slinget/ of some of our Midland counties. Our Dictionaries know nothing of it ; nor should they take note of it on the score of its present provincial existence ; but they should on the ground that it once had free course in our literary English, being often used by Fuller. 1 Once more, take the verb 'to hazle/ Halliwell and Wright explain it rightly as " the first process in drying washed linen," and assign to it also East Anglia as the region where it is current ; but it was once not East Anglian, but English, as a noble passage, of which I cite a few words, from a great but little-known divine, will prove. 2 Then, once more, the verb c to flaite/ signifying to scare, to terrify, and standing in the same relation to f flit ' that ' fugare' does to ' fugere' — this may be, as our glossaries tell us, a word of the North Country now ; but it was a word of the whole country once, and as such should have found place not in our glossaries alone, but in our Dictionaries no less. 3 1 To hopple' (the word is not in Richardson) , Todd gives as a northern word, and without example. Supposing he was right in saying so, he had no business to give it at all ; but he is not ; for it is employed by Henry More. 4 ' Dozzled' our archaic glossaries assign to the Eastern Counties, 1 " The tribe of Judah with a narrow spong confined on the kingdom of Edom." — APisgah Sight of Palestine, pt. 2, b. 4, c. 2 ; and often. 2 " Thou, who by that happy wind of thine didst Jiazle and dry up the forlorn dregs and slime of Noah's deluge, cause a new face of zeal and grace to appear upon our age, drunken and soaked with ease and sen- suality." — Rogees, Naaman the Syrian, p. 886. 3 " Desire God to flayte and gaster thee out of that lap and bosom, as Samson out of Dalilah's." — Id. ib. p. 877; cf. pp. 138, 453. 4 " Superstitiously hoppled [i.e. entangled] in the toils and nets of superfluous opinions." — On Godliness, b. 9, c. 7, § 8. 14 ON SOME DEFICIENCIES IX and explain rightly as meaning stupid, heavy; but we should not have to seek it, or at least to find it, only in them ; Bishop Hacket employs it. 1 I believe a corn-sieve is still called a l try' 2 in some parts of England, a small enclosure a ' pingle/ 3 a pond a 'pulke/ 4 but the words had once nothing local about them, that they should be relegated to these collections, and found only in them. While I am thus dealing with obsolete words, and before leaving this part of my subject, let me say a word or two on w T hat the Germans call nebenformen (we have no word which exactly answers to this), and adduce a handful of these, in proof of the incompleteness with which they are given in our Dictionaries. It was once attempted to make an English word of c analysis/ and to speak of the f analyse:' 5 examples of this I have before me in Henry More, Hacket, Rogers ; but our Dictionaries do not notice it. When ' big' was intended in the sense of proud, it often took the shape of e bog:/ 6 ' To ditch' 7 was current as well as ' to clutch/ 1 corsive' no less than ' corrosive/ ' Flox' 8 was a variation of f flax' as well as f nix / it was applied like l flix' to the down 1 " In such a perplexity every man asks his fellow, What's best to be done ? and being dozzled with fear, thinks every man wiser than him- self." — Life of Archbishop Williams, pt. 2, p. 142. 2 " They will not pass through the holes of the sieve, ruddle, or try, if they be narrow." — Holland, Plutarch, p. 86. 3 " The Academy, a little pingle or plot of ground, was the habita- tion of Plato, Xenocrates, and Polemon." — Id. ib. p. 275. 4 " It is easy for a woman to go to a pond or pulke standing near to her door (though the water be not so good) rather than to go to a foun- tain of living water further off." — Kogees, Naaman the Syrian, p. 842. 5 " The analyse of it [a little tractate] may be spared, since it is in many hands." — Hacket, Life of Archbishop Williams, pt. 2, p. 104. 6 " The thought of this should cause the jollity of thy spirit to quail, and thy bog and bold heart to be abashed." — Eogees, Naaman the Syrian, p. 18. 7 " If any of them be athirst, he hath an earthen pot wherewith to ditch up water out of the running river." — Holland, Xenophon's Cyropcedia, p. 4. 8 " They dress it [their nest] all over with down feathers, or fine Jlox." —Id. Pliny, pt. 1, p. 288. OUR ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 15 of animals. Like almost all other words of the same kind, ' stick/ for instance, which varies with ' stitch/ ' belk' with 'belch/ so ' prick' appears often as 'pritch/ 1 1 ruddle' 2 existed as well as l riddle' or ' raddle.' ' To wanze' is the constant form in which ' to wane' occurs in some of our writers ; 3 our glossaries take notice of the word, characterizing it as a form of East Anglia, but it ought to find place in our Dictionaries as well. These last have f priestess/ but not ' priestress/ 4 which is curious as having been evidently formed while the word was yet in that earlier shape, which survives in ' Pr ester John.' II. Families of words in our Dictionaries are often in- complete, some members inserted, while others are omitted; the family being really larger and more widely spread than they leave us to suppose. Thus ( awk/ which survives in our f awkward/ has not merely ( awkly/ but ' awkness/ 5 which none of them have found room for. Coleridge, I am iaclined to believe, supposed he had formed upon ' aloof the very serviceable word, f aloofness / but, though it has found its way into none of our Dictionaries, it also is two hundred years old. 6 f Nasute' should have been 1 "The least word uttered awry, the least conceit taken, or jpr itch, the breaking in of a cow into their grounds, yea, sheep or pigs, is enough to make suits, and they will be revenged." — Rogees, Naaman the Syrian, p. 270. 2 "The holes of the sieve, ruddle, or try." — Holland, Plutarch, p. 86. 3 "Many bewrayed themselves to be time-servers, and warned away to nothing, as fast as ever they seemed to come forward." — Rogees, Isaaman the Syrian. 4 "The jpriestress of Minerva, in Athens." — Holland, Plutarch, p. 866. 5 " Come, my child, I see thou fearest thou shalt never get anything ; but look not thou at thine own awkness, look at the Lord's ease." — Rogees, Naaman the Syrian, p. 378. 6 " [God] stings him by unthankfulness of such as owe most love, by unfaithfulness and aloofness of such as have been greatest friends." — Id. ib. p. 95. 16 ON SOME DEFICIENCIES IN completed with ' nasuteness ; l 'fume* and ' furnish ' with ' fumishness ; 2 ' verb' and 'verbal' with f verbalist; 3 ' con- culcate/ as its legitimate consequence, has ' conculcation/ 4 If ' quadripartite/ why not ' quadripartition / 5 if l afterwit/ why not ( afterwitted/ 6 as an epithet applied to those who deal in ( hadiwist/ (had-I-wist) or wisdom which always arrives too late for the occasion — a more pregnant word than should be willingly lost sight of? If ' say' as equal to essay or proof, why not also 'sayman/ 7 above all, with Bacon's authority for its use ? Again, if our Dictionaries find room, as they ought, for ' kex/ the old English name for hemlock, (or one of them rather, for only Richardson has it), why not also for ' kexy' ? 8 if ' fitch/ another form of vetch, is admitted, why not also 1 " All which, to any man that has but a moderate nasuteness, cannot but import, that in the title of this sect that call themselves the Family of Love, there must be signified no other love than that which is merely natural or animal." — H. Moee, On Godliness, b. 8, c. 2, § 2. 2 " Drive Thou out of us all fumishness, indignation, and sen-will." — Coveedale, Fruitful Lessons (Parker Soc. ed.), p. 284. 3 ■'" The frothy discourses of empty verbalists." — Gell, Essay toward the Amendment of the English Translation of the Bible, 1659, Preface. " Yet not ashamed these verbalists still are, From youth, till age or study dims their eyes, To engage the grammar rules in civil war." — Lobd Beooke, On Human Learning. 4 " The conculcation of the outward Court of the Temple by the Gentiles." — Heney Moee, Mystery of Iniquity, b. 2, c. 12, § 1. 5 " The quadripartition of the Greek Empire into four parts." — Id. ib. b. 2, c. 8. § 3. 6 " Our fashions of eating make us slothful and unlusty to labour and study, .... aftenoitted (as we call it), incircumspect, inconsiderate, heady, rash." — Tyndale, Exposition of Matthew vi. 7 " If your lordship in anything shall make me your sayman, I will be hurt before your lordship shall be hurt."— Letter to the Earl of Buckingham. 9 " The earth will grow more and more dry and sterile in succession of ages ; whereby it will become more Jcexy, and lose of its solidity." — H. Moee, On Godliness, b, 6, c. 10, § 3. OUR ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 17 f fitchy 1 ?' if they find place for f fog' (I mean in the sense of rank grass) , they should do so for ' foggy/ 2 stuffed with this rank grass, as well. ' Spendthrift' should have { spend- thrifty / 3 ' hispid' should be completed with ' hispidity/ 4 ' specious' with ' speciosity/ 5 and though one may not be in love with ' sordidity/ 6 yet, since BurtGn uses it, there is no ground for its omission. Why again ' maleficent/ and not also c maleficence / 7 ' sanguinolent/ and not e san- guinolency/ 8 'flowret/ and not ' flowretry / 9 ' fashion/ and not ' fashionist ;' 10 f prowl' and ' prowler/ without 'prowlery/ 11 'brim' (in the sense of fierce, vehement), and 1 " Each board had two tenons fastened in their silver sockets, which sockets some conceive made fitchy or picked, to he put into the earth ; which we rather believe flat and firm, standing fast on the surface of the ground." — Fullee, A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, pt. 2, b. 4, c. 4. 2 " Those who on a sudden grow rather foggy than fat by feeding on sacrilegious morsels, do pine away by degrees, and die at last of incurable consumptions." — Id. ib. pt. 1, b. 3, c. 12. 3 " Spendthrifty, unclean, and ruffianlike courses." — Rogees, Naa- man the Syrian, p. 611. 4 " The hispidity, or hairiness of his skin." — H. Moee, On Godli- ness, b. 3, c. 6, § 5. 5 " So great a glory as all the sjpeciosities of the world could not equalize." — Id. ib. b. 4, c. 12, § 4. 6 " Weary and ashamed of their own sordidity and manner of life." — Bueton, Anatomy of Melancholy , pt. 3, 2, 5, 3. 7 " The Bishop of Lincoln felt it, who fell into trouble, not for want of innocence, but for want of a parliament to keep him from maleficence." — Hacket, Life of Archbishop Williams, pt. 2, p. 85. 8 " That great red dragon with seven heads, so called from his san- guinolency." — H. Moee, Mystery of Iniquity, b. 1, e. 8, § 4. 9 " Nor was all this flowretry, and other celature on the cedar, lost labour, because concealed." — Fullee, A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, pt. 1, b. 3, c. 5. 10 « ^y e ma y conce i ve many of these ornaments were only temporary, as used by the fashionists of that age." — Id. ib. pt. 2, 6, 4, § 7. 11 " Thirty-seven monopolies, with other sharking prowleries, were decried in one parliament." — Hacket, Life of Archbishop Williams, pt. 1, p. 51. C IS ON SOME DEFICIENCIES IN not ' brimly ; n ' gingerly/ that is, youngherly, and not 1 gingerness' 2 also ? Many verbs, such as ' to ease/ ' to merit/ ( to extirp/ the older form of ( to extirpate/ have substantives formed on them — ' easer/ 3 c meriter/ 4 ' extirper/ 5 If it be urged that this is assumed of course, and that it therefore is super- fluous to note them, I cannot assent to this explanation of their absence; and seeing that ' forfeit er/ 'lapper/ c thirster/ and other little-used words of the same formation, are introduced, there is at least an inconcinnity in omitting these, as they have been omitted by tens and by hundreds. But further, to work back from later formations to earlier, on which they are superinduced, and which they not merely pre-suppose as possible, but which actually exist. If ' sorti- legious' is admitted, ' sortilege' 8 should be so as well; if ' pervicacious/ then 'pervicacy/ 7 which it assumes, and which has been in actual use, should not be left out, as it is by Richardson, and, which is the same thing, left without an example by Todd; ' garish 3 should not stand without 'gare/ 8 nor ' soporous ' and ' soporiferous/ without ' sopour/ 9 1 " A man sees better, and discerns more brimly his colours." — Put- TENHam, Art of Poetry, p. 256. 2 " It is a world to consider their coyness in gestures, . . . tlieir gin- gerness in tripping on toes like young goats." — Stubs, The Anatomy of Abuses, 1585, p. 42. 3 Kogees, Naaman the Syrian, p. 40. 4 Id. ib. p. 341. 5 " Founders of states, lawgivers, extirpers of tyrants, fathers of the people, were honoured." — Bacon, Of the Interpretation of Nature. 6 " I have good hope that as the gods in favour have directed this sortilege, so they will be present and propitious unto me." — Holland, Livy,?. 1 183. 7 " The Independents at last, when they had refused with sufficient pervieacy to associate with the Presbyterians, did resolve to show their proper strength." — Sylvestee, Life of Richard Baxter, p. 104. 8 " The multitude hastened in a fell and cruel gare to try the utmost hazard of battle." — Holland, Ammianus Marcellinus, p. 412. " In a gare and heat they will run, ride, and take any pains; but only so long as the pang holds." — Eog-ees, Naaman the Syrian, p. 390. 9 " To awake the Christian world out of this deep sopour or lethargy. — H. Moee, Mystery of Iniquity, Preface to the Second Part. OUR ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 19 c Exearnincatioix' stands in Todd (it is not in Richardson) without f excarnificate/ 1 from which it grew; in like manner we have ( dehonestation/ but not the verb { to dehonestate/ 2 which yet is employed by Jeremy Taylor ; ( fellowfeeling/ but not the verb ' to fellowfeel/ 3 The designation of a female person, by changing f er' into ' ess/ as ' flatterer/ c natteress/ or by the addition of 'ess/ as c captain/ 'captainess/ was once much more common than it is now. The language is rapidly abdicating its rights in this matter. But these forms, though now many of them obsolete, are very indicative of the former wealth of the language, and have good claim to be regis- tered. I have noted the following : f buildress/ 4 c captainess/ 5 ' natteress/ 6 ' intrudress/ 7 f soveraintess/ 8 which have not so been. 1 "What [shall we say] to the racking and excamificating their bodies, before this last punishment?" — Id. ib. b. 2, c. 15. 2 " The excellent and wise pains he took in this particular no man can dehonestate or reproach, but he that is not willing to confess that the Church of England is the best reformed Church in the world." — Sermon preached at the Funeral of the Lord Primate. 3 " We should count her a very tender mother which should bear the pain twice, and fellowfeel the infant's strivings and wrestlings the second time, rather than want her child." — Rogees, Naaman the Syrian, p. 339. 4 "Sherah,the daughter of Ephraim the younger, the greatest buildress in the whole Bible." — Fullee, A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, pt. 1, b. 2, c. 9. 5 " Dar'st thou counsel me From my dear captainess to run away?" — Sie P. Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, 88. 6 " Those women that in times past were called in Cypres, Colacides, i.e.Jlatteresses." — Holland, Plutarch, -p. 86. 7 " Joash should recover his rightful throne from the unjust usurpation of Athaliah, an idolatrous intrudress thereinto." — Fullee, A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, pt. 2, b. 3, c. 10. 8 " O second honour of the lamps supernal, Sure calendar of festivals eternal, Sea's soveraintess, sleep-bringer, pilgrim's guide, Peace-loving queen." — Sylvestee, Du, Bartas. Fourth Day of the First Week. c 2 20 ON SOME DEFICIENCIES IN A vast number of diminutives exist in the language, which have never found their way into our Dictionaries. Here are eight with a single termination : ( wormling/ 1 'loveling/ 2 c dwarfling/ 3 c chasteling/ 4 (= eunuch), ' time- ling/ 5 'setting/ 6 'niceling/ 7 Adjectives in f en/ of the same formation as our still existent ' brazen/ ' earthen/ l wheaten/ and noting, like the Greek adjectives in ivog, the stuff or material of which any- thing is made, have been far more numerous than our Dic- tionaries would imply. I can only adduce these four, ' eldern/ 8 f tinnen/ 9 l yarnen/ 10 ( wispen/ 11 as having found no place in them ; but am disposed to think many more will yet be 1 " O, dusty wormling ! dar'st thou strive and stand With heaven's high Monarch ? wilt thou (wretch) demand Count of his deeds ?" — Id. The Imposture. 2 " These frolic lovelings fraighted nests do make." — Id. ib. 3 " When the dwarfling did perceive me." — Id. The Woodman s Bear, 33. 4 " It [Matthew xix.] entreateth of three kinds of chastetings" — Becon, Contents of St. Matthew's Gospel. 5 " Divers ministers, which are faint-hearted, and were, as it seemeth, but timelings." — Id. The Supplication. 6 " Such as be newly planted in the religion of Christ, and have taken no sure root in the same, are easily moved as young settings." — Id. Preface to Various Tracts. 7 " But I would ask these meetings one question, wherein if they can resolve me, then I will say, as they say, that scarfs are necessary, and not flags of pride." — Stubs, The Anatomy of Abuses, 1585, p. 42. 8 " Her chiefest pride is in the multitude of her suitors, and by them she gains; for one serves to draw on another, and with one at last she shoots out another, as boys do pellets in eldern guns." — Sib Thomas Oyeebuey, Characters. An Ordinary Widow. 9 " Thy tinnen chariot, shod with burning bosses, Through twice six signs in twice six twelve months crosses." — Sylvesteb, Du Bartas. Fourth Day of the First Week. 10 " A pair of yarnen stocks to keep the cold away." — Tubbeville, Letter out of Muscovy. 11 " She hath already put on her tvispen garland." — Gr, Habvey, Fierce s Supererogation, Archaica, vol. 2, p. 149. OUR ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 21 found. It is only in the Supplement to Richardson that 1 stonen' has for the first time made its appearance. I must class under this rubric words which appear in our Dictionaries as subsisting only in one part of speech, when indeed they are two or more. Thus they have ' a snag/ but not ' to snag/ 1 — Todd, indeed, has the word, but as provincial, and giving no example of it. ( To snig/ 3 (another form of the word) is entirely wanting. They have ' cinder/ but not, with Gascoigne, l to cinder / 3 ' ignoble/ but not, with Lord Bacon, ' to ignoble / 4 ' unactive/ but not f to unactive/ 5 And then, reversing the case, we find in them ' to cancel/ but not l a cancel/ 6 with Jeremy Taylor ; f to strut/ and ' a strut/ while ' strut/ 7 as an adjective, is wanting; so, too, is ' diary/ 8 they have ' pleasant/ but not 'a pleasant' 9 = a buffoon. The omis- sions in this kind are indeed innumerable. I might have found a fitter opportunity for noticing, yet, 1 " Beware of snagging and snarling at God's secrets." — Rogees, Naaman the Syrian, p. 14; cf. p. 291. 2 " Others are so dangerously worldly, snigging and biting, usurers, hard and oppressing." — lb. id. p. 211. 3 " where sword and cindring flame Consume as much as earth and air may frame." — The Fruits of Wars. 4 " Ignobling many shores and points of land by shipwreck." — A Discourse in praise of Queen Elizabeth. 5 " The fatness of their soil so stuck by their sides, it unactived them for foreign adventures." — Fullee, A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, b. 2, c. 10. 6 " Whose spirit desires no enlargement beyond the cancels of the body, till the state of separation calls it forth into- a fair liberty." — Life of Christ, pt. 3, sect. 13, § 9. 7 " He beginneth now to return with his belly strut and full." — Holland, Ammianus Marcellinus, p. 213. 8 " The offer of a usurpation, though it was but as a diary ague." — Bacon, Letters, 83. 9 " They bestow their silver on courtesans, pleasants, and flatterers." — Holland, Plutarch, p. 169. " Ridiculous jesters 3nad.pleasa?its" — Id. ib. p. 106. 22 OX SOME DEFICIENCIES IN rather than not notice at all, I will notice here that, while we have a vast company of energetic words, formed as ' telltale/ l spitfire/ l spendthrift/ still current among us, a far larger company has past out of use, and of these many remain to this day unnoted in our Dictionaries. I instance the following: ( getnothing/ 1 'swillbowl/ 2 'pickpenny/ 3 ' nipfarthing/ 4 ' turntippet/ 5 Richardson indeed has ' to turn tippet/ but not the noun. III. Our Dictionaries do not always take sufficient care to mark the period of the rise of words, and where they have set, of their setting. The length of life which belongs to different words is very different, some describing much larger arcs than others. There are those which rose with the first rise of the language, and which, we may confidently prophesy, will always remain above the horizon. Others, rising as early, have already sunk and disappeared. Others rising later, will yet, so far as we can judge, continue so long as it continues. Others, again, describe far lesser arcs than any of these ; rising at a comparatively late period, they are already lost to our sight again ; they lived only the life of some single man ; or, it may be, used only once by him, their rising and their setting was at the same instant of time. But for all this, if their author and proposer was 1 " Every getnothing is a thief, and laziness is a ' stolen water.' " — Adams, The Devil's Banquet, 1614, p. 76. 2 " Wantonness was never such a swillhowl of ribaldry." — G. Haevet, Pierce's Supererogation, Archaica, vol. 2, p. 141. 3 " He [the Pope] sending out and dispersing these birds of his to be his hungry picJcpennies throughout the whole pasturage of the empire." — H. Moee, Mystery of Iniquity, b. 2, c. 9, § 8. 4 " I would thee not a nipfarthing, Nor yet a niggard have : Wilt thou, therefore, a drunkard be, A dingthrift and a knave ?" — Deant, The Satires of Horace, Sat. I. 5 " The priests, for the most part, were doublefaced, turntippets, and flatterers." — Ceanmee, Confutation of Unwritten Verities. OUR ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 23 anything better than one of that rabble of scribblers who hang on the skirts of literature, doing their worst to profane and degrade it and language which is its vehicle, these words should not on this account the less find place among those archives of a language which it is the business of a Dictionary to preserve. Now these arcs, wider or narrower, which words describe, are well worthy of being measured, so far as they come within the scope of our vision; and our complaint is that adequate care has not been bestowed on this matter. It is in every case desirable that the first authority for a word's use in the language which occurs should be ad- duced; that the moment of its entrance into it, (that is, into the written language, for this only comes under our cognizance), the register of its birth, should thus be noted. Of course no Dictionary can accomplish this completely. Every lexicographer must be content to be often set right here, and to have it shown that earlier authority existed for a word than that which he assumed the earliest, till thus by repeated corrections something of an approach to complete accuracy in this matter is attained. But I doubt whether Johnson even so much as set this before him as an object desirable to be obtained. To a certain extent Todd evidently did so. Thus he has sometimes thought it worth his while expressly to note that authorities exist for a word earlier than any which Johnson has quoted; see for in- stance under the words, ' financier/ c canaille/ l privateer/ Richardson has accomplished far more than either in this matter; though, strangely enough, he sometimes goes back from the vantage ground which his predecessors had already occupied, and satisfies himself with a later authority, when they had furnished him ready to hand with an earlier, and therefore a better. It cannot be brought as any charge against him, the first deliberate and consistent worker in this field, that he has left much in it for those who come after him to accomplish. For 2i ON SOME DEFICIENCIES IN this is a work, as I have said, in which every one who engages will have for a long time to come to submit to innumerable corrections from those who succeed him. To bring a few instances in proof, — one might suppose from Richardson that the word ( scoundrel' first came up in the eighteenth century, for the first authority which he gives for it is Swift ; and in discussing its etymology he says, u the instances of its usage are so modern, that it seems difficult to connect it with an Anglo-Saxon origin." Johnson has here the advantage of him ; for he traces it back as far as Butler (Hudihras) ; but, in fact, ' scoundrel ' is much older than this, being found not merely in Beau- mout and Fletcher, but in Warner's Albion's England} which was first published in 1586. Take another example. Whatever merit there may be in the word ' witticism/ Dry den fancied he might claim for himself. " Pardon/'' he exclaims, as he uses it, if a new word ;" 2 and Todd explicitly, the others implicitly, allow his claim to have coined it. But so far from the word issuing first from his mint, as thus he implies it to have done, Milton had employed it some twenty years before. 3 Our Dictionaries would leave us to suppose that ( com- mittee' arose about the period of our great Civil Wars ; but from Holland's Livyf published in 1600, we may learn that it was current nearly half a century before. Of ' econo- mize' Richardson observes, " the verb is now in common use," implying that it is quite of modern coinage; and Todd speaks of it as " of very recent usage ;" — an entire 1 " That scoundrel or this counterfeit." — B. 6, c. 31. 2 Preface to his State of Innocence. 3 " Tis no great wonder that such a three-lettered man as you (Fur a Thief) should make such a witticism on three letters." — Defence of the English People, c. n. 4 " The committees of the captives had audience granted them in the senate-house by the Dictator." — p. 468. OUR ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 25 mistake ! it is as old as Milton. 1 ' Apostate/ or f apostate/ which form of the word lasted long, did not first come in about the time of the Reformation, as all our Dic- tionaries might lead us to conclude, but is in fact as old as Piers 'Ploughman? But if it be thus desirable to note in every case, so far as this is possible, the first appearance of a word, then all those tokens which will sometimes cleave to words for awhile, and indicate their recent birth, ought also to be diligently noted. None are more important in this aspect than what one may fitly call " marks of imperfect natu- ralization." Many words, as is familiar to us all, have only by degrees made themselves a home among us : denizens now, they were at first strangers and foreigners, and bore plainly on their fronts that they were so ; the foreign ter- mination which for a while they retained, but now have dropped, being commonly that which betrayed their alien character, their as yet imperfect adoption among us. It is clear that in no way is the date of a word's incoming likely to be more effectually marked than by the marking and adducing of passages in which it still wears its foreign aspect ; not to say that in other ways the history of a word is incomplete unless this be done. There has hitherto been comparatively little attention bestowed upon this point by any of our lexicographers, and, on the whole, less by Richardson than by his predecessors. They show us in- deed, either one or all, how 'pyramis' and 'pyramides' went before ' pyramid ' and f pyramids/ f statua J before i statue/ e preludium ' before ' prelude/ f caricatuiV before ' caricature / that f phantasma/ ( classis/ ( syntaxis/ pre- 1 " [Men] under tyranny and servitude, are wanting that power which is the root and source of all liberty, to dispose and (economize in the land which God has given them." — The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, ad finem. 2 " And whoso passed that point Was apostata in the ordre." — Line 667, 8. 26 ON SOME DEFICIENCIES IN ceded { phantasm/ l class/ ' syntax/ with something more in the same kind ; but a vast number of examples, passed over by them, still remains to be noticed. Of these I propose to adduce a few. I will notice first some Greek immigrations, the time of whose incoming may in this way be pretty accurately noted ; but which have either escaped the attention of our lexico- graphers, or have seemed to them unworthy of note. "We should scarcely suspect ' biography' to be so recent as it is, were it not for the fact that Dryden continually uses 1 biographia/ 1 ' Cynosura/ 2 employed by Hacket and Henry More, preceded ' cynosure / ' demagogi/ 3 employed also by Hacket, went before ' demagogues/ Bearing out the novelty of this last word in the middle of the seventeenth century, let me just remind you that Milton in his EIkovo- icXacrrrj^ finds in the use of ' demagogue^ in the Icon Basi- like, — (< this goblin word," as he calls it, — an argument that King Charles could not have been author of the work. f Chasma' 5 is employed by Henry More, long before ( chasm' was naturalized in our tongue. f Heros/ 6 too, is in constant 1 " Biographia, or the history of particular men's lives, comes next to be considered." — Life of Plutarch. 2 " The Countess of Buckingham was the cynosura that all the Papists steered by." — Life of Archbishop Williams, pt. i. p. 171; cf. Hexey Moee, immortality of the Soul, b. 3, c. 17, § 7. 3 " Those noted demagogi were but hirelings, and triobulary rheto- ricians." — Life of Archbishop Williams, pt. i. p. 175. 4 His words are so curious that, though quoted by Bichardson and referred to by Todd, I will append them here: — "Setting aside the affrightrnent of this goblin word [demagogue], for the King, by his leave, cannot coin English as he could money to be current, and it is believed this wording was above his known style and orthography, and accuses the whole composure to be conscious of some other author." — § 4. 5 " Observe how handsomely and naturally that hideous and unpro- portionate chasma betwixt the predictions in the eleventh chapter of Daniel and the twelfth is in this way filled up with matters of weighty concernment." — Mystery of Iniquity, b. 2, c. 10, § 8. 6 " But to return to the description of this heavenly heros: A sharp- edged sword is said to go out of his mouth." — lb., b. 2, c. 14, § 6. OUR ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 27 use by him, and the plural is ' heroes/ a trisyllable, in Spenser. ( Idioma' 1 occurs in the Heliconia, also in Drayton; f paral- lelogrammon ,3 in Holland, ' extasis' 3 in Burton, f prosodia' 4 in Drayton, ' zoophyton' 5 in Henry More, ' epitheton' 6 in Foxe. I will now pass on to the Latin, dealing with all as such, whose terminations are such, and, Greek though they may be, have come to us through the Latin. f Chylus' 7 is fre- quent in Bacon, and, if the examples of ' chyle' in our Dic- tionaries are the earliest, preceded it by at least half a century. Jackson uses ' abyssus/ 8 Baxter and Henry More ' archiva ;' 9 Worthington f diatriba; no Jeremy Taylor 'expansum; ni 1 " Impartial judge of all save present state, Truth's idioma of the things are past." — Heliconia, vol. 3, p. 461. 2 " Suppose, then, there be a figure set down in form of a tile, called parallelogrammon, with right angles A, B, C, D." — Plutarch, p. 1036. 3 " In the same author is recorded Carolus Magnus' vision, an. 885, or extasis, wherein he saw heaven and hell." — Anatomy of Melancholy, pt. 3, § 4, 1. 2. 4 " Every grammarian in this land hath learned his prosodia, and already knows all this art of numbers." — Apology for Rhyme. 5 " A zoophyton may be rightly said to have a middle excellency betwixt an animal and a plant." — Mystery of Iniquity, b. 1, c. 9, § 3. 6 " Alter the epithetons [these epithetons are ' horrible,' ' heretical,' * damnable,' and the like, applied to the doctrines of the Eeformation] and I will subscribe." — Boole of Martyrs, Second Examination of Julius Palmer. 7 " Mists, smoke, vapours, chylus in the stomach." — Natural History, cent. ix. § 837. 8 "This is a depth or abyssus which may not be dived into." — Com- mentaries on the Creed, b. 11, c. 19, § 6. 9 " The Christians were able to make good what they asserted by appealing to these records, kept in the Koman archiva." — H. Moke, On Godliness, b. 7, c. 12, § 2. 10 " That excellent diatriba upon St. Mark." — Preface to Medes Works, p. 1. 11 " The light of the world in the morning of creation was spread abroad like a curtain, and dwelt nowhere, but filled the expansum with a dis- semination great as the unfoldings of the air's looser garment, or the wilder fringes of the fire." — The Miracles of the Divine Mercy; cf. Heney Moee, Mystery of Iniquity, b. 1, c. 5, § 7. 28 ON SOME DEFICIENCIES IN Fuller ' interstitium ; n Chillingworth ' intervalla / 2 Henry More 'machina/ 3 Culvervvell ' philtrum ; H Burton 'spec- trum/ 5 ' Mummy/ not a Latin word, but coming to us through the low Latin, appears for some time as ' mummia/ still wearing its Latin dress. 6 Sometimes we can only tell by aid of the plural that the word was once regarded as foreign, though now it is so regarded no more. Thus ' phalanx' 7 in the singular would tell us nothing, because this is the form which we have ultimately adopted ; but the plural ' phalanges/ instead of 'phalanxes/ leaves no doubt that he who employed it regarded the word as a Greek one still. ' Cento' 8 in like manner is not indicative, but ' centones' is ; we may say the same of ' bisontes/ 9 as compared with 'bison/ ' Idea n0 leaves us doubtful, but 'idese* is decisive. ' Noctambulo/ which 1 " There was an interstitium or distance of seventy years between the destruction of Solomon's and erection of Zorobabel's temple." — A Pisgah Sight of Palestine, pt. i, b. 3, c. 6. 3 " They conceive that if they should have the good fortune to be taken away in one of these intervalla, one of these sober moods, they should certainly be saved." — Nine Sermons, p. 11. 3 " Three such contextures shall one fatal day Ruin at once, and the world's machina, Upheld so long, rush into atoms rent." — On Godliness, p. 42. 4 " Lucretius, a Roman of very eminent parts, which yet were much abated by a, philtrum that was given him." — Light of Nature, c. 17. 5 " Lavater puts solitariness a main cause of such spectrums or appa- ritions." — Anatomy of Melancholy, part 3, § 4, 1, 2. 6 Webstee, Yittoria Corombona, act 1, sc. 1. 7 " Aforetime they had their battallions thick and close together like the Macedonian phalanges." — Holland, Livy, p. 286. 8 " Centones are pieces of cloth of divers colours. . . . Metaphorically it is a poem patched out of other poems by ends of verses." — L. Vives, Augustine's City of God, b. 17, c. 15, note. 9 " Neither had the Greeks any experience of those neat or buffles, called uri or bisontes." — Holland, Pliny, pt. 2, p. 323. 10 " Socrates and Plato suppose that these idea be substances separate and distinct from matter." — Id., Plutarch, p. 813. OUR ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 29 for a long time did the duty which f somnambulist* does now, and was thoroughly naturalized in Arbuthnot's time, for he speaks of c noetambuloes' (see Richardson), was plainly far from so being in Donne's, for whom the plural of it is f noctambulones.' 1 And to take example of a single Italian word ; ' bravo' 2 being the form in which we have ultimately made this word our own, has no information for us ; but where ' bravi,' and not ' bravoes,' appear as the plural, this marks it for him who so used it as Italian still. It must at the same time be freely acknowledged that these are not perfectly infallible signs ; that one writer will still deal with a word as a stranger, and lead us to suppose it so, while another, who wrote earlier, had already treated it as an homeling. Thus I find c depositum' 3 used by more writers than one, and that a considerable time after Lord Bacon had employed l deposit/ Some, too, persisted in constantly using l hostia,' 4 long after l host' was completely adopted in the language. There are many other ways nearly related to this one, by which the date of a word's first appearance may be approxi- mately gained ; passages by aid of which we may pretty confidently affirm that, at the time they were written, the word was not in existence : these also I should desire to see gathered in. Thus if Sir Walter Raleigh speaks of " strange visions which are also called panici terrores"* it is tolerably plain that the word c panic' was not yet recognized when he wrote. Or take this quotation from Hacket's Life of Williams : 6 li When wars broke out, they 1 " They say that our noctambulones, men that walk in their sleep, will wake if they be called by their names." — Sermon 46, p. 467. 2 "Hired fencers, called bravi." — Moeison, Itinerary, pt. 2, p. 25. 3 " They [precious souls] are laid up as a rich depositum in the hand of a Saviour." — Culveewell, TJie Worth of Souls ; cf. Rogees, Naaman the Syrian, To the Reader. 4 Thus Moeison, Itinerary, pt. 3, p. 32, and passim. 5 History of the World, b. 3, c. 6, § 1. 6 Pt. 2, p. 182. 30 ON SOME DEFICIENCIES IN crept out of their crannies like the cimici in the houses of Italy, out of rotten bedsteads ;" — can I doubt that the ugly English equivalent for 'cimici' had not yet obtained the name by which we know it now ? The word indeed existed, but not our present appropriation of it. 1 Once more — I meet in a book published in 1659/ the following passage : "But all these owned a TroXvOua/jiog, a plurality of gods." I am not very rash in concluding that in 1659 ' polytheism' had not yet found its way into the language. Or again if I find ' acme' written in Greek cha- racters, as I do in South, in Culverwell, 3 and again in Phillips' excellent Preface to his New World of Words* if in addition to this I find it also explained, I have right to assume, that in the middle of the seventeenth century 1 acme' was not yet naturalized in our tongue, although the time of its naturalization could not be far. off. Or, once more, if. I notice that at a certain epoch of the language not one but many writers employ c individuum,' 5 where we should speak of an l individual,' I am justified in concluding that however, as an adjective, it may have been for some time current among us, it had not gained an independent ex- istence, and a noun substantive's right to stand alone. Bacon's use of it as equivalent to ' atom' is merely technical. Neither ought a Dictionary to neglect what one may call the negative assistances (they are often no more than hints), 1 We have further proof of this in such a passage as the following : — " Do not all as much and more wonder at God's rare workmanship in the ant, the poorest bug that creeps, as in the biggest elephant ?" — Rogees, Naaman the Syrian, p. 74. 2 Gell, Essay toward the Amendment of the English Transla- tion of the Bible, p. 336. 3 The Light of Nature, c. 4. 4 " The Latin language was judged not to have come to its ok/zj?, or nourishing height of elegance, until the age in which Cicero lived." — 3rd ed. 1 67 1. 5 " He cannot possibly mean that every individuum should give his suffrage." — Culveewell, The Light of Nature, c. 4. OUR ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 31 by a careful observation, and judicious use of which, it will very often be possible to fix a time when some word certainly did not as yet exist; while with the period of its non- existence in this way firmly established, and the field of inquiry thus effectually narrowed, there will be little diffi- culty in designating the exact time when it first showed itself in the language. For example, if I find a writer treating of a matter which presents every inducement to employ a certain word, and notwithstanding this, in no single instance employing it, I argue with more or less confidence that the word was not then in being. Thus if I read page after page in Holland's Pliny, where every temptation exists to employ the word c sculptor/ for the author whom he is translating, is treating at great length, and one by one, of the famous sculptors of antiquity, while instead of this he constantly employs ' imager/ I gather not a certainty, but a very strong conviction, that ' sculptor/ at the time he wrote, was not in being ; as I am persuaded from other evidence it was not, nor till the middle of the seventeenth century. Dryden is the first authority for it in our Dictionaries, though earlier than he might be adduced. Again, if I find various devices resorted to by the writers at the beginning of that same century to express a tract of land almost surrounded by sea, so that they employ ' biland/ 1 ' demi-isle/ ' demi-island/ 2 I am able without much hesitation to affirm that c peninsula' was not yet ackowledged to be English. The use of c engastrimyth' makes the existence of ventriloquist at the same time, I will not say impossible, but certainly improbable. All passages yielding hints of this kind should be sedulously watched for and preserved. 1 " From hence, a great way between, is that liland, or demi-isle, which the Sindi inhabit." — Holland, Ammianus Marcellinus, p. 200. " In the Eed Sea there lieth a great demi-island named Cadara, so far out into the sea that it maketh a huge gulf under the wind." — Id. Pliny, pt. I, p. 235. 32 ON SOME DEFICIENCIES IX Yet here, too, it must be freely acknowledged that all such conclusions are open to error; as it must ever be, where the proofs are rather negative than positive. Thus, if frequently meeting with the word ' counterpoison ' in the writings of Holland, which I have quoted so often (Richard- son has it not, and Johnson only a late example of it), I should therefore conclude that ' antidote ' did not yet exist ; his own pages would be sufficient to convince me of error. The employment of that excellent Saxon phrase, ' ear-shrift/ by our early Reformers (it is not in our Dictionaries), might easily tempt us to believe that ' auricular confession ' was of later invention, which, however, is by no means the case. I have dwelt so long on the importance of noticing the rise of words, and the helps by which this may be done, that I must be very brief in respect of their setting. Yet, if a Dictionary should thus carefully indicate the moment of their first appearance above the horizon, it should, in case of those again withdrawn from our sight, note with the same diligence the moment of this disappearance; giving, that is, or endeavouring to give, in the case of each obsolete word, the latest instance of its employment ; that so, as we saw it in the cradle, we may also follow it, where dead, to the grave. When I say that this is desirable, that this is to be aimed at, it must of course be allowed at once that it is difficult, nay, impossible ever to affirm that we have adduced the latest instance of a word's use. It is always possible that a later may be produced. Still, that which may be regarded as the ideal perfection in this matter may be approached nearer and nearer ; and as long as passages are producible later than the latest hitherto ad- duced, this ideal perfection is not approached as nearly as it might be. Here, too, it may very well be a question whether Johnson set this before him at all; or, indeed, there can be no question that he did not. Neither has Todd concerned himself for the last use of words so much as for the first. OUR ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 33 Richardson has made it much more an object. Still in this matter also of watching a word's final exit much remains to be accomplished. Thus, the latest example, indeed the only one, which Richardson' gives of ' unease ' (the word is not at all in Johnson), is from Chaucer. We might thus be led to conclude that ' unease' had vanished out of the language at a very early date ; but it occurs as late as the middle of the seventeenth century, 1 nearly three centuries later than the date which he seems to assign to it. Many other words he would leave us to conclude had a briefer existence than was actually the case. They have perished, it is true; but still they were not so short-lived as his quotations would imply. Out of a large number of such, I will only cite one or two. ' Unidle' 2 (not in Todd), one might suppose from Richardson, had not outlived Chaucer : it was still good English in the time of Sidney. Of ( unlusty' (in like manner not in Todd), no later authority occurs in Richardson than Gower : the word is employed by Tyndale and by Holland. 3 There are some who perhaps may urge that all this is trivial and of little importance. I cannot agree with them. A word's birth may not be as important as a man's birth ; but a biography which should omit to tell us when he was born whose life it professes to record, would not, in my mind, be a whit more incomplete in its kind than is the article in a lexicon which makes no attempt to fix, where there are any means for doing so, the date of a word's first appearance in the language. And as with birth, so also with death. Where a word is extinct, not to note, where this is possible, the time of its extinction, seems in its way as serious an omission as in the life of a man not to tell us the 1 " What an unease it was to be troubled with the humming of so fcaany gnats." — Hacket, Life of Archbishop Williams, pt. 2, p. 88. 2 " For me, I do nature unidle know." — Astrojphel and Stella, 26. 3 " He [tlae hippopotamus] waxeth unlusty and slow." — Ammianus Marcellinus, p. 213. D 34 OX SOME DEFICIENCIES IN time, when that can be ascertained, when that life was ended. IV. Our Dictionaries might note more accurately than they do, and illustrate by suitable quotations, the earlier uses which words have now left behind them, the successive modifications of meaning through which they have passed. It is one of the primary demands which we make upon a Dictionary, that it should thus present us with the history of words, the significant phases of meaning through which they have travelled. It was a remark of Coleridge, that you might often learn more from the history of a word than from the history of a campaign ; and this is true. Johnson is very faulty here; perhaps in nothing more so. Nothing is commoner with him than to take the last meaning at which a word has arrived, the ultimate result, and to put this first and foremost, either quite over-passing, or placing last, the earlier uses which alone render the latter intelligible. The difficulties and confusions which are thus introduced into any attempt at an accurate and historical study of the lan- guage are scarcely capable of exaggeration. Turn, for instance, to the first word in which it was at all easy for him to go wrong, the word ' to abandon •/ all the meanings which he gives, or which his citations bear out, are secondary or tertiary ; the primary he does not once touch ; and thus fails to put ' abandon ' in any intelligible relation with ' bann/ ' bannum/ which lies at the foundation of it. Richardson has bestowed far more attention on this part of his task than his predecessors, and not seldom the series of quotations by which he illustrates the successive phases of meaning through which a word has passed is singularly happy. Still, with all his superiority, I do not find him always careful in this matter to embody and preserve what his forerunners had won, sometimes going back from a point which they had already attained. Thus I find notices in Johnson or Todd, with good illustrative examples, of the following uses of words, which I look for vainly in him; 'fenii- OUR ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 35 nine' in the sense of effeminate; 'thought* in that of anxiety 1 (important as clearing our Translators from a charge of mistranslation at Matt. vi. 25, 27, often brought against them) ; ' vivacity* in that of longevity, * misery* in that of stinginess, c temperament* in that of ' temperamentum* or compromise, ' formality* in its strictest logical significance. But these and other omissions must not rob him of the honour of having here done much, although still leaving much to be accomplished by those who come after. I will proceed by quotations, which, if few, shall yet be sufficient, to make good my assertions. I cannot then find that any of our Dictionaries take notice of ' metal* used in the sense of the Latin ' metallum* or mine, which is yet a favourite employment of the word with Jeremy Taylor. 2 In like manner he employs ' symbol* 3 in the sense which the Greek