Chapter 2

Of printed English-Latin works, after the _Promptorium_, one of the earliest was the _Vulgaria_ of William Herman, Headmaster and Provost of Eton, printed by Pynson in 1519. This is a _Dictionarium_ or _liber dictionarius_ in the older sense, for it consists of short _dictiones_ or sayings, maxims, and remarks, arranged under subject-headings, such as _De Pietate_, _De Impietate_, _De corporis dotibus_, _De Valetudinis cura_, _De Hortensibus_, _De Bellicis_, and finally a heading _Promiscua_. It may therefore be conceived that it is not easy to find any particular _dictio_. Horman was originally a Cambridge man; but, according to Wood, he was elected a Fellow of New College, Oxford, in 1477, the very year in which Caxton printed his first book in England, and in this connexion it is interesting to find among the illustrative sentences in the _Vulgaria_, this reference to the new art (sign. Oij): 'The prynters haue founde a crafte to make bokes by brasen letters sette in ordre by a frame,' which is thus latinized: 'Chalcographi artem excogitauerunt imprimendi libros qua literæ formis æreis excudunt.' Of later English-Latin dictionaries two deserve passing mention: the _Abecedarium_ of Richard Huloet or Howlet, a native of Wisbech, which appeared in the reign of Edward VI, in 1552, and the Alvearie of John Baret, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, published under Elizabeth in 1573. The Abecedarium, although it gives the Latin equivalents, may be looked upon to some extent as an English dictionary, for many of the words have an English explanation, as well as a Latin rendering; thus _Almesse_, or gift of dryncke, meate, or money, distributed to the poore, _sporta_, _sportula_; _Amyable_, pleasante, or hauing a good grace, _amabilis_; _Anabaptistes_, a sorte of heretyques of late tyme in Germanye about the yere of our Lorde God 1524.... _Anabaptistæ_.

Baret's _Alvearie_ of 1573 has been justly styled 'one of the most quaint and charming of all the early Dictionaries.' In his 'Prefatory Address to the Reader' the author tells, in fine Elizabethan prose, both how his book came into existence, and why he gave it its curious name:--

'About eighteene yeeres agone, hauing pupils at Cambridge studious of the Latine tongue, I vsed them often to write Epistles and Theames together, and dailie to translate some peece of English into Latine, for the more speedie attaining of the same. And after we had a little begun, perceiuing what great trouble it was to come running to me for euerie worde they missed, knowing then of no other Dictionarie to helpe vs, but Sir Thomas Eliots Librarie, which was come out a little before; I appointed them certaine leaues of the same booke euerie daie to write the english before the Latin, & likewise to gather a number of fine phrases out of Cicero, Terence, Cæsar, Liuie, &c. & to set them vnder seuerall titles, for the more readie finding them againe at their neede. Thus, within a yeere or two, they had gathered together a great volume, which (for the apt similitude betweene the good Scholers and diligent Bees in gathering their waxe and honie into their Hiue) I called then their _Aluearie_, both for a memoriall by whom it was made, and also by this name to incourage other to the like diligence, for that they should not see their worthie praise for the same, vnworthilie drowned in obliuion. Not long after, diuers of our friends borrowing this our worke which we had thus contriued & wrought onelie for our owne priuate vse, often and many waies moued me to put it in print for the common profet of others, and the publike propagation of the Latine tongue.'

But when Baret at length resolved to comply with this suggestion, there were many difficulties to be overcome, the expense of the work being not the least:--

'And surelie, had not the right honourable Sir Thomas Smith knight, principall Secretarie to the Queenes Maiestie, that noble Theseus of learning, and comfortable Patrone to all Students, and the right Worshipfull M. Nowell, Deane of Pawles, manie waies encouraged me in this wearie worke (the charges were so great, and the losse of my time so much grieued me) I had neuer bene able alone to haue wrestled against so manie troubles, but long ere this had cleane broken off our worke begun, and cast it by for euer.'

Between the dates of the _Abecedarium_ and the _Alvearie_, Peter Levins, Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, published, in 1570, the first essay at an English Riming Dictionary, the _Manipulus Vocabulorum_, or Handful of Vocables, an original copy of which is in the Bodleian Library; it was reprinted for the Early English Text Society in 1867 by Mr. H.B. Wheatley. The English words are arranged in order of their terminations, and each is furnished with a Latin equivalent.

Of all the works which we have yet considered, Latin was an essential element: whether the object was, as in the glossaries and vocabularies before the fifteenth century, to explain the Latin words themselves, or as in the _Promptorium_ and _Catholicon_, the _Abecedarium_ and the _Alvearie_, and other works of the sixteenth century, to render English words into Latin. But a new stage of development was marked by the appearance of dictionaries of English with another modern language. In 1521, the 'Introductory to write and to pronounce Frenche,' by Alexander Barclay, author of the 'Ship of Fooles,' was issued from the press of Robert Coplande; and about 1527 Giles du Guez or du Wes (anglicized Dewes), French teacher to the Lady Mary, afterwards Queen Mary, published his 'Introductorie for to lerne to rede, to pronounce and to speke French trewly.' In addition to grammatical rules and dialogues, it contains a select vocabulary English and French. In 1514, Mary Tudor, younger sister of Henry VIII, became the unwilling bride of Louis XII of France. To initiate the princess in her husband's tongue, John Palsgrave, a native of London and graduate of Cambridge, who had subsequently studied in Paris, was chosen as her tutor, and accompanied her to France. For her use Palsgrave prepared his celebrated _Esclarcissement de la Langue Françoyse_, which he subsequently revised and published in 1530, after his return to England, where he was incorporated M.A. at Oxford. The _Esclarcissement_ is a 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 '[Greek: Haegemon eis tas glossas], 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, 5-1/2 inches by 3-1/2, 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 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 all, direct from Kersey's Dictionary.

More than 100 years had now elapsed since Robert Cawdrey prepared his 'Table Alphabeticall,' and nearly a century since the work of Cockeram; and all the dictionaries which had meanwhile appeared, although their size had steadily increased, were, in purpose and fact, only what these works had been--Vocabularies of 'Hard Words,' not of words in general. The notion that an English Dictionary ought to contain _all_ English words had apparently as yet occurred to no one; at least no one had proposed to carry the idea into practice. But this further step in the evolution of the modern dictionary was now about to be made, and the man who made it was one of the most deserving in the annals of English lexicography. We now, looking back on the eighteenth century, associate it chiefly with the work of Dr. Johnson; but down beyond the middle of that century, and to the man in the street much later, by far the best-known name in connexion with dictionaries was that of NATHANAEL BAILEY. An advertisement appended to the first edition of his Dictionary runs thus: 'Youth Boarded, and taught the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin languages, in a Method more Easy and Expedient than is common; also, other School-learning, by the _Author_ of this _Dictionary_, to be heard of at Mr. Batley's, Bookseller, at the Sign of the Dove in Paternoster Row.' Bailey was the author or editor of several scholarly works; but, for us, his great work was his _Universal Etymological English Dictionary_, published in 1721. In this he aimed at including all English words; yet not for the mere boast of 'completeness,' but for a practical purpose. The dictionary was not merely explanatory, it was also etymological; and though Englishmen might not need to be told the meaning of _man_ or _woman_, _dog_ or _cat_[10], they might want a hint as to their derivation. Bailey had hit the nail aright: successive editions were called for almost every two years during the century; when the author died, in 1742, the tenth edition was in the press. In that of 1731, Bailey first marked the stress-accent, a step in the direction of indicating pronunciation. In 1730, moreover, he brought out with the aid of some specialists, his folio dictionary, the greatest lexicographical work yet undertaken in English, into which he also introduced diagrams and proverbs. This is an interesting book historically, for, according to Sir John Hawkins, it formed the working basis of Dr. Johnson[11].