The Pathos and Humor of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary

I

WE are apt to think of this great book as the work of a pious, not overclean old scholar, much given to talk and tea, and somewhat too fond of abusing people. It will come, therefore, as a surprise to some to learn that the Dictionary was the work of ‘an obscure young man’ (I am quoting Dr. Burney, Fanny’s father), who, ‘single-handed’ and alone, began it when he was little more than thirty-six years of age; that he had completed it before he had received any degree from any university; that he kept back the title-page until the authorities at Oxford had time to confer upon him a small degree, that of Master of Arts; that it was many years later that finally and forever he became ‘Dr. Johnson.’

It was Robert Dodsley, the publisher, who first made the suggestion that Johnson should undertake the work, but Johnson told Boswell that he had long thought of it himself; and it was another publisher, Andrew Millar, who, associated with Dodsley and others, carried on the negotiations which led to Johnson’s receiving fifteen hundred and seventy-five pounds for the complete work, out of which he was to pay the expenses of his six amanuenses while the book was in progress. It was not much, but Johnson never complained; he said he hated a complainer, and years later, when Boswell remarked that he was sorry he had not received more for his work, his reply was, ‘I am sorry, too, but it was very well; the booksellers are generous, liberalminded men; they are the true patrons of literature.’

Johnson, when he made his bargain with the booksellers, expected that he would be able to complete the work in about three years, and, when a friend pointed out that it took the French Academy, which consisted of forty members, forty years to compile its Dictionary, replied, ‘This, then, is the proportion: forty times forty is sixteen hundred; as three is to sixteen hundred, so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman.’ But it took him, in fact, seven years: when he first began his labors he was living in Holborn, but he soon took a large house (still standing) at 17 Gough Square, just off Fleet Street, in the garret of which, fitted up like a rude countinghouse, he carried to completion his work.

William Strahan, the printer of the Dictionary, had his printing establishment not far off, and it was to be near him that Johnson indulged himself with the most commodious residence he ever had; and, moreover, had he not just been promised fifteen hundred and seventy-five pounds? — which he may have thought a magnificent sum. Poor fellow! He little thought that after the completion of his great undertaking he would be arrested for a debt of five pounds, eighteen shillings, which amount he was to borrow from Samuel Richardson, the author of Pamela, and thus free himself from the bailiffs. I have always thought it curious that Samuel Johnson never met Benjamin Franklin: both were living in London at the same time, and both were intimate friends of Strahan’s, to whom, it may be remembered, Franklin addressed one of his cleverest letters. One is permitted to wonder what would have happened at a meeting of the wisest and wittiest American that ever lived with the wisest and wittiest Englishman of his time. I believe it has not yet been decided what takes place when an irresistible force meets an immovable body.

It is rather curious too that, although Johnson affected to dislike Scotchmen, practically all who were concerned with the Dictionary were Scotch: five out of six of his amanuenses were, as were also Millar, his publisher-in-chief, and Strahan. Millar must have been sorely tried by Johnson’s lack of punctuality, for we are told that when the work was finally done, and the last sheet brought to him, he exclaimed, ‘Thank God I have done with him.’ Johnson, on being told this, replied with a smile, ‘I am glad that he thanks God for anything.’

Eight years before the Dictionary was published, Johnson had printed what he called The Plan of a Dictionary, addressed to the Earl of Chesterfield. It was an elaborate outline of what he hoped to accomplish by his work, but the noble lord paid no attention to it until, on the eve of publication, Dodsley informed him that, after many years of toil, the book was about to make its appearance, and no doubt reminded him that the Plan had been addressed to him, and perhaps suggested that if he expected the work to be dedicated to him it was time for him to make some sign of his approval.

Chesterfield took the hint and wrote two letters to the World, which were fulsome in their flattery. In one he said, ‘In times of confusion we must chuse a Dictator. ... I give my vote for Mr. Johnson . . . and I hereby declare that I make a total surrender of all my rights and privileges in the English language as a free born British subject, to the said Mr. Johnson during the term of his dictatorship. Nay, more, I will not only obey him, like an old Roman, as my Dictator, but like a modern Roman, I will implicitly believe in him as my Pope, and hold him to be infallible.’ This, it will be admitted, was very handsomely said, but in between the time when the Plan was published and the Dictionary completed, something had happened: Chesterfield had totally neglected the Lexicographer, who was, indeed, the proudest man in England. ‘Ay, sir,’ said Johnson, when Boswell taxed him with it, ‘but mine was defensive pride.’ ‘And,’ continued Johnson, ‘after making great professions he had, for many years, taken no notice of me, but when my Dictionary was coming out he fell to scribbling in the World about it.’ But Johnson — although he defined himself as a lexicographer, and a lexicographer as a ‘harmless drudge’ — was not to be beguiled, and, seizing his pen, he wrote what is probably the most smashing letter in all literature: —

Seven years, my Lord, have now passed since I waited in your outward room or was repulsed from your door, during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain, without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. . . . The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labors had it been early, had been kind, but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary and cannot impart it; till I am known and do not want it.

It is a great letter — too long to quote in its entirety — and it must have crushed, utterly, a man less vain and complacent than the man to whom it was addressed. Carlyle called it a ‘blast of doom, proclaiming into the ears of Lord Chesterfield, and through him to the listening world, that patronage should be no more.’ It was indeed a Declaration of Independence.

The book appeared in two large folio volumes, on February 20, 1755. It was a time of profound depression for Johnson: he had, as he said, ‘devoted the labor of years, to the honor of my country that we may no longer yield the palm of philology without a contest to the nations of the continent,’ but, as he also said, ‘I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss the book with frigid tranquillity — having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.’

II

In this brief paper I shall not attempt to conceal the fact that I regard the present great esteem which the world — our world, that is — has for Dr. Johnson, his Life, and his works, with some amusement. It may be that I am to some extent responsible for it: at any rate, if you enter any good bookshop in England and ask for any book by Dr. Johnson in first edition you will almost certainly be met with a sad shake of the head and the remark that Johnson, in first editions, is almost impossible except at prohibitive prices, and that this advance is due to the American demand. And then you may be told — as I have been, more than once — that ‘a man in Philadelphia is largely responsible for Johnson’s being collected; before he began to write about him, Boswell’s Life, a big ugly book in two volumes, was hard to sell at three guineas; there was no more demand for Johnson’s Dictionary than there was for — Fox’s Martyrs, and now you can’t get them fast enough.’

Forty years ago my friends used to say, by way of disconcerting me, ‘Eddie, tell us something about Dr. Johnson,’ and usually I did so, for I had just fallen under the spell of Boswell and was by way — as far as a man with a treacherous memory could be — of knowing him by heart. It is a happy possession and affords one an apt quotation in every conceivable discussion and upon every possible occasion. Have you a difficult business matter to discuss? Do it after a good dinner and not before: remember what Dr. Johnson says: ‘Sir, a good dinner lubricates business.’

Since then I have met many Johnsonians, and have come to believe that all Johnsonians are good fellows, — ‘clubable’ men, as Dr. Johnson would say, — and as the years passed and I came to know wiser and better Johnsonians than myself this suspicion became conviction. Finally came the desire to own, and in some measure to know, the books of the Great Lexicographer himself.

But I remember that my copy of the first edition of Boswell’s Life was purchased for twenty dollars, — a good copy cannot now be had for less than three hundred, — and the first Rasselas I ever bought cost me but ten, and the last, two hundred. And as for the Dictionary — well, Mrs. ThralePiozzi’s copy, probably given her by Johnson, with her inscription and a fine holograph letter from the Lexicographer, cost me only sixty dollars; and a fine copy in boards, uncut, thirty-five! Taking a census of the Johnson Dictionaries now in my library, I find I have in all five copies of the first edition, besides a copy which was once Charles Dickens’s, with his notes therein, and an excellent — shall I say common or garden copy? — a reprint from the author’s last folio edition, in one volume, for ready reference, which was once E. Coppee Mitchell’s

Why so many?

Let me explain. One copy I bought to show people to whom one copy is as good as another: this saves wear and tear on the copies I highly value. Two came in this way. On the fifteenth of February, last year, my great friend and fellow Johnsonian, Mr. R. B. Adam of Buffalo, had a sale at the Anderson Galleries in New York of a portion of his library — not of his wonderful Johnson collection, but of books of which he had tired or which did not fit into the period which he has made peculiarly his own. With the idea of paying him homage, I gave a little dinner in New York, the first night of the sale, to a small group of friends and booksellers (friends also). It was a speedy affair: including speeches, we were at the table just one hour and fifteen minutes, and it may be remembered by those present that Mr. Owen D. Young — that accomplished gentleman who, in company with General Dawes, brought order out of chaos in Germany — signally failed to secure a hearing at our little dinner party; whereupon the meeting adjourned to the auction room.

The sale had just begun, and as we took our seats my wife joined my friend Mr. William Jay Turner, who had been one of my party, and I took a seat in the back part of the room next to Walter Hill, the Chicago bookseller, and immediately bought a book I did n’t want just to prevent him from getting it. (He did n’t want it either.) We were in just the form that brings joy to the heart of an auctioneer. The books were fine and the sale went merrily.

After a time a copy of the Dictionary, first edition, two volumes, old calf, was put up, and I saw at once that it was not Adam’s best copy: it was what might be called ’a spare.’ The bidding started at fifty dollars, went to one hundred and fifty, — the then proper price for the book, — then more slowly to three hundred; and finally it was knocked down at three hundred and twenty dollars to — of all people in the world — my wife, who wanted it as a souvenir of a pleasant evening. Whereupon, discovering that my friend Turner was the runner-up,— he wanted the book for the same reason my wife did, and would have paid any amount had he not discovered that he was in competition with Mrs. Newton, — I rose and assured all present that there was, obviously, no ‘ knock-out ’ in the room — and the sale went on.

Subsequently, in talking over the events of the evening, which is one of the delights of a good auction, Jay Turner asked me to watch my chance and pick up for him a good copy of the Dictionary, which I promised to do. Several months later, in the catalogue of an English bookseller, I noticed a copy — Mrs. Vesey’s copy — priced at forty pounds, and I at once cabled for it. Mr. Vesey was a member of ‘the Club’ founded by Dr. Johnson, was elected through the influence of Edmund Burke; and it was Mrs. Vesey who gave the famous bluestocking parties. She did n’t wear blue stockings herself — a man by the name of Stillingfleet wore them; Mrs. Vesey’s were — what they were; certainly not the skin-colored kind so much in evidence to-day. Her copy of the Dictionary, then, was one which Dr. Johnson might have seen in the library in her house in Clarges Street, and, conceivably, the not too Reverend Laurence Sterne might have referred to it to settle some disputed point in conversation — for, it will be remembered, he was much with Mrs. Vesey, on whom he was very sweet, as he was on every other pretty and attractive woman he met.

Here, then, was a copy of the Dictionary with a ‘provenance’ of which anyone might be proud, and I certainly hoped to get it; but in due course I received a letter from the bookseller saying that he was sorry he could not send me the desired item, as an hour before my cable arrived he had received a cable from Mr. Adam of Buffalo, to whom the volume must be dispatched. ‘That settles that,’ said I.

But not so. A month later a bulky package arrived at my office; opening it, I found Mrs. Vesey’s copy of the Dictionary, and a wonderful letter from Adam telling me that he had immediately made up his mind not to take my wife’s money for his copy of the Dictionary (she had paid for it out of the household account, and we had been living on short rations); that this was a better copy; that it had once belonged to a famous lady and had her signature and bookplate; that it was bound in three volumes, with a separate title-page for the third volume, to be easier for reference; and, finally, that I was to take the copy which had once been his, and upon some suitable occasion to present it with his compliments to the Shakspere Society of Philadelphia, over which my friend Dr. Furness presides with such distinction. Here, then, was a very pretty ‘amenity,’— which Johnson defines as ‘an agreeableness of situation,’ — and such are not of infrequent occurrence among those who play at this book-collecting game.

III

It is a wonderful book, is Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary; and think of the circumstances under which it was composed: ‘with,’ as its author says, ‘ little assistance of the learned; without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under academic bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow.’ ‘What do you read, my lord?’ ‘Words, words, words,’ replies Hamlet. Buckle read it through to enlarge his vocabulary; so did Browning; and no other dictionary can be read with such pleasure and profit, for in it Johnson gave — and for the first time — quotations from esteemed authors illustrating the use of words he defined. He fitted himself for this mighty task by diligent reading, underscoring with a pencil the selections which were subsequently copied out on slips of paper by his amanuenses: his marvelous memory, of course, stood him in good stead, while the range of his reading was boundless. And yet he always spoke and thought of himself as lazy. One day, entering Mrs. Thrale’s drawing-room and seeing her dog asleep before the fire, he remarked, ‘Presto, you are, if possible, a lazier dog than I am.’

Every reader of Boswell will remember the kindly interest that Johnson took in Fanny Burney: how he called her his ‘Little Burney,’ and extolled her first — and only good — novel to the skies; saying it was superior to the work of Fielding and equal to that of Richardson. I have always thought this excessive eulogy was by way of return for the interest her father had shown him at the time the Dictionary was published. Charles Burney, not yet the distinguished Doctor of Music which he subsequently became, was then living in Norfolk. He does not appear to have known Johnson personally, but to have made his acquaintance through his Ramblers. When the Dictionary was announced in the newspapers, he wrote Johnson a kindly letter and offered to subscribe for six copies for himself and his friends. I have an autograph letter in Johnson’s hand, in which he says, ‘ I was bred a bookseller and have not forgotten my trade,’ but he was not soliciting orders for his book, and asked that Mr. Burney direct his inquiries to Mr. Dodsley, ‘because it was by his recommendation that he was employed in the work.’ But note the modesty of the great man: ‘When you have looked into my Dictionary, if you find faults I shall endeavour to mend them; if you find none I shall think you blinded by kind partiality.’

Then followed further letters on the subject, and seemingly Mr. Burney was insistent that he be sent a prospectus, order forms, and the like — what we would to-day call ‘literature’ on the subject. A letter has recently come into my hands, from which I must quote, as it shows only too clearly Johnson’s habit of procrastination and at least one reason for his depression. This letter is addressed from Gough Square to Mr. Burney, and reads, in part:—

SIR,
That I may shew myself sensible of your favours, and not commit the same fault a second time I make haste to answer the letter which I received this morning. The truth is, the other likewise was received, and I wrote an answer, but being desirous to transmit you some proposals and receipts, I waited till I could find a convenient conveyance, and day was passed after day, till other things drove it from my thoughts, yet not so, but that I remember with great pleasure your commendation of my dictionary. Your praise was welcome not only because I believe it was sincere, but because praise has been very scarce. A man of your candour will be surprised when I tell you that among all my acquaintance there were only two who upon the publication of my book did not endeavour to depress me with threats of censure from the publick, or with objections learned from those who had learned them from my own preface. Yours is the only letter of goodwill that I have yet received, though indeed I am promised something of that sort from Sweden.

Can we wonder at the great man’s depression ? Years of work rewarded by poverty and neglect, and one letter of goodwill and a promise of something from Sweden. The day of the patron was past, and the day of the logroller had not yet come.

Slowly, and by degrees, Johnson’s Dictionary became a best seller, and a best seller it remained for almost a century. ‘What I like about your Dictionary, Mr. Johnson,’ said one old lady to him, ‘is that it has no naughty words in it.’ ‘Madam, I hope you have not been looking for them,’ replied the Lexicographer. And to another, who remarked that for steady reading it changes the subject pretty often, Johnson admitted that it had that fault in common with most dictionaries. Again, to someone who said that the word ‘ocean’ was omitted, he replied, ‘Madam, you will look for it in vain if you spell it. o-s-h-u-n.’ Garrick, his old friend and former pupil, broke into verse about it, and so marvelous an actor was the little man that his cleverness as a poet of occasional verse has never been fully recognized. Let me quote his lines: —

IV

Some of Johnson’s definitions have given the world amusement since the day of publication. Let me give a few examples.

A blister sounds worse than it is: he defines it as ‘a pustule formed by raising the cuticle from the cutis, and filled with serous blood.’

Buxom, now understood to mean ‘plump and comely,’ was defined thus: ‘It originally signified obedient. Before the reformation the bride in the marriage service promised to be obedient and buxom in bed and at board.’ Alas! the word has gone, and ‘obey’ is going, we are told. I am against change in any form and would put ’em both back.

Johnson’s opportunity of studying wild animals at close range was slight, even had his eyesight been good. A camelopard ‘is an Abyssinian animal taller than an elephant but not so thick. He is so named because he has a neck and head like a camel; he is spotted like a pard’ (a pard is a leopard) ‘but his spots are white upon a red ground. The Italians call him a giaraffa.'

Cant was particularly offensive to Johnson, and he was frequently heard to say, when in heated argument with a friend, ‘Clear your mind of cant’ — which was ‘a whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms.’

A chicken was, among other things, ‘a term for a young girl.’ You have seen a chicken flap its wings: hence ‘flapper,’ the word of to-day; and I have observed as I get older that flappers get better-looking and wear fewer clothes.

Much danger lurks in a cough: it is ‘a convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity.’ There is a priceless poem — and a poem is ‘ sense enriched by sound’ — which I wish Dr. Johnson could have known: —

Perhaps because Johnson was himself an essayist, he does not rate that form of composition highly. An essay he calls ‘a loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition.’

The thought of death in any form was at all times abhorrent to him; hence we are not surprised to learn that death’s-door ‘is now a low phrase.’

The definition of excise is one of the Doctor’s most famous: ‘A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged, not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.’ This definition roused to fury the Commissioners of Excise, who sought the opinion of the Attorney-General, afterward Lord Mansfield, whether or not it was libelous. He thought that it was, but wisely suggested that the author be allowed an opportunity of altering his definition; it was not changed.

One definition of favourite is ‘a mean wretch whose whole business is by any means to please.’

Grubstreet: ‘Originally the name of a street in Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems.’ The street still exists, but it is now Milton Street — not named after the poet, as is generally supposed, but after a builder of that name.

Leeward and windward, though of opposite meaning, are both described as ‘towards the wind.’

A lexicographer is ‘a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the significance of words.’ Johnson was not above making fun of himself as well as others.

Network has indeed a portentous definition: it is ‘anything reticulated, or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.’

Oats is equally famous: ‘A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.’ ‘Very true,’ was the retort of Lord Elibank, ‘and where will you find such men and such horses?’

Pastern is defined as ‘the knee of a horse.’ It led a lady to question him how this slip was made. Johnson’s reply is historic: ‘Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance.’

And his definition of patriotism — that is to say, ‘reform’ — is not in the Dictionary, but it should be worn as a sort of badge by every wouldbe reformer: ‘The last refuge of a scoundrel.’

A pension is ‘an allowance made to anyone without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.’ When, subsequently, Johnson accepted a pension from the King, this definition was brought up against him, but it moved him not an iota. ‘I wish,’ he said, with a laugh, ‘ that my pension had been twice as large, that they could make twice as much fun of it.’

A poetess is a ‘ she poet.’ I am afraid this is not a very gallant definition. Perhaps Johnson had in mind Anna Seward, alias ‘the Swan of Lichfield,’ as she loved to hear herself called.

A stockjobber is ‘a low wretch who gets money by buying and selling shares in the funds.’ We should now say ‘stockbroker,’ and it will occur to some that the definition is not obsolete.

Tory ‘is a cant term derived’ (Johnson supposes) ‘ from an Irish word signifying a savage,’but he indulges himself in one of his rolling periods by adding: ‘One who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the Church of England.’ No one doubts that Johnson was a Tory.

Whig is defined as ‘the name of a faction’; and in conversation he did not hesitate to say that ‘the first Whig was the Devil.’

But it was in the ‘Grammar of the English Tongue’ that Johnson made his most risible slip — where he says: ‘H seldom, perhaps never, begins any but the first syllable.’ Wilkes, the scamp, pounced on this instantly with the sarcastic remark: ‘The author of this observation must be a man of quick appre-hension, and of a most comprehensive genius.’ Johnson, no doubt, felt the shaft, but. malignancy, if it is to be kept in the air, must, like the shuttlecock, be struck from both sides: Johnson let it pass and the sneer was forgotten. It was not until the fourth edition that he paid his compliments to Wilkes in this sentence: ‘It sometimes begins middle or final syllables in words compounded, as in block-head.’ Johnson would never permit anyone to ‘get his goat,’ as we should now say.

The list might be longer, but to what end? Only, as Johnson said, that the ‘few wild blunders might for a time furnish folly with laughter.’ So much for his definitions. Scholars say that his etymologies are defective; Macaulay calls them wretched, and it may be that they are. I hate to quote Carlyle, that dyspeptic prophet, but, after all, no one had a juster appreciation of Johnson than he. Listen to him: ‘Had Johnson left nothing but his Dictionary, one might have traced there a great intellect, a genuine man. Looking to its clearness of definition, its genuine solidity, honesty, insight, and successful method, it may be called the best of all Dictionaries. There is in it a kind of architectural nobleness: it stands like a great solid squarebuilt edifice, finished: symmetrically complete; you judge that a true Builder did it.’

Johnson’s Dictionary was based on a work compiled and published in 1721 by Nathaniel Bailey. Bailey’s dictionary is a mere list of words. Johnson had an interleaved copy of it made, and worked therefrom. This book was exhibited at Stationers’ Hall in London so recently as 1912. Who has it now? Johnson’s own copy of the last edition of his Dictionary to be published in his lifetime is now one of the treasures of the John Rylands Library in Manchester. I wonder whether this is the copy that at the sale of Johnson’s library after his death, in ‘Mr. Christie’s Great Room in Pall Mall,’ brought the magnificent sum of thirteen shillings! But then, it was disfigured by his notes, and we must remember, too, that his first folio of Shakespeare, similarly disfigured, brought only twentytwo. And consider the price of the smallest scrap of Johnsoniana to-day!

Let us allow our imagination to play for a moment and fancy that the tools of Johnson’s trade—his library — could be reassembled and resold in New York City to-morrow, at Mitchell Kennerley’s Great Room. What competition there would be, with ‘Dr. R.’ and ‘Brick Row’ and ‘Dunster House,’ to say nothing of the ‘Wells of English undefiled,’ and Drake, and Beyer, and Walter Hill—all of the talent, with unlimited bids from Adam and Isham and Young and Clark and PforzUeimer and Hearst, and all the lesser fry of Johnsonians who are numbered as the sands of the sea. I should have at such a sale just as much chance as a canary at a cats’ congress; and yet, Doctor, if I did not set your ball a-rolling, I certainly gave it acceleration. They tell me that, there are Johnson collectors in England; are there forsooth? And they put a price of five pounds on your Life by Boswell; we, of ‘the Plantations,’ put it at fifty, and it is worth a hundred. It is the greatest biography in the world, and the best part of it, a taste of its quality, was published the year after your death, and is known as A Tour to the Hebrides: it is the quintessence of Boswell.

Why is all the world ‘Johnsonianissimus’ to-day? Johnson had, according to Taine, ‘ the manners of a beadle and the inclinations of a constable.’ Every Johnsonian will have a different answer, and they will all be right. This is Austin Dobson’s opinion: —

V

A happy coincidence enables me to display to my friends an important manuscript of which not everyone, not even every Johnsonian, knows the existence.

In 1772, Johnson, then being in his sixty-third year, wrote in Latin a long ode addressed to himself, with a Greek title which translates, ‘Know Thyself.’ In it he compares himself — and to his disadvantage — with the great French scholar, Scaliger, and says that indolence and a penury of mind coöperate to prevent him from taking on another task, if indeed he has the requisite knowledge. Instead of which he confesses that he seeks

(I am quoting from a translation), relief from the dull melancholy which at all times dogs his steps. The poem closes:

How he answered the self-imposed question is beyond the scope of this paper.

Finally, — and I seem to hear the sigh of relief which is occasionally audible in church at the end of a long sermon, — I wish to dip my flag to the latest descendant of Dr. Johnson’s genius, the Concise Oxford Dictionary. I own that colossal monument of wordy learning, the New English Dictionary, so far as it is published, but its possession is a species of swank, and I seldom refer to it. But the Concise is ever at hand. It is a masterpiece of reference and condensation. Derivations do not much interest me, but I like to have some idea of the meaning of the words I am using, and, as I dictate more than I write, I have forgotten — if indeed I ever knew—how to spell. Every foreign word that has worked its way into our language is given in it, and one small joke, for which I love it. I can imagine several learned old gentlemen, sitting and sipping their port after a dinner at the ’high table’ in some Oxford college, debating whether the joke might be permitted: wisely they agreed that it might. Turn to the word ‘wing’: it is defined, ‘One of the limbs or organs by which the flight of a bird, bat, insect, angel, &c., is effected.’ How do we know that angels fly? Who ever saw one? But this is no place for skepticism: the authority of the greatest of universities is not to be challenged by an insect.