Vergilian words used by Ovid, fabula, facundia, charta, and praeconia are outside the sphere of Vergil, and besides this praeconia occurs but once in the Metamorphoses, and vagus is not in the poems of his exile. This shows for Ovid a rather definite localization in the use of the last two words. The color of infirmus and of titulus may have been fixed for Vergil by the use made of them by Horace: Ep. II, 16 tondet infirmas oves; Sat. II, 3, 212 prudens scelus ob titulos admittes inanes. The latter word is the only one used "freely," and has real Ovidian color, although it occurs relatively less frequently in the Metamorphoses than in the other works.

The length of the Messalla, compared with the length of the works of Ovid, is about 1:160. But this is of no value in computing the number of occurrences of a word either in the poem or in Ovid. Only a few more than two score of the Messalla words are used by Ovid more than 160 times, and neither in the case of these nor of those occurring less frequently, is the quotient any indication of number of instances in the Messalla. Ovid has the verb do 1140 times, the Messalla once. Division of the one number by 160, and multiplication of the other is equally futile. If 63, the number of occurrences of propero in Ovid, or 14 of charta, or 19 of vagus, should be divided by 160 would it give three as the number of occurrences for each in the Messalla? The same question can be asked in regard to the same process applied to the occurrences of words in Ovid and in the Vergilian Appendix. In this case, as in the comparison of the poems of the Tibullan Appendix with those of Tibullus, the material is too limited to give any indication whatever of the possible range of the vocabulary of the writers, and non-occurrence of single words leaves no basis at all for computations.

Let us briefly summarize. Variety is the spice of style for Roman writers, and they often purposely make the second setting of a word different from the first. There is for them an extensive occasional vocabulary of words occurring from one to three times. These indicate points in the plane of each writer's vocabulary, and its incommensurability with the vocabulary of another. Investigation shows both a non-Vergilian and a non-Ovidian element in the poems of the Vergilian Appendix. It also shows a nonrecurring element in the poems of Ovid. Both non-recurrence and the allied phase of low proportion of occurrences fail as a

test of authorship in works whose authors are known. Mathematical proportions of the masses of words do not apply to the component parts, for these depend on the range of the writer's thought and the technicality of the subject. As a final word we may say that comparisons of the usage in the Vergilian Appendix with that in Vergil will be futile until Vergil's field of expression has been so carefully surveyed and platted that a place can be shown in it for the non-recurrent elements.

JOHNSON'S DICTIONARY REVIEWED BY HIS

CONTEMPORARIES

By STANLEY RYPINS

San Francisco State Teachers College

"Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach.''

Dr. Johnson.

Dr. Johnson's disconcerting admission in the preface to his dictionary that in "many particulars" his work "will admit improvement from a mind utterly unequal to the whole performance" was no effective deterrent to his critical contemporaries, not a few of whom singled out passage after passage for correction or ridicule. To many students of Johnson's works, the Dictionary is memorable chiefly for the wealth of anecdote which such picayunish criticism supplied. Equally interesting, however, though less familiar, are the longer and more general estimates of the new lexicon by competent reviewers of Johnson's time.

Shortly after the publication, in 1755, of the Dictionary, there appeared in the Edinburgh Review a long criticism, written probably by Adam Smith, a part of which reads as follows:

A Dictionary of the English Language... has never been hitherto attempted with the least degree of success. To explain hard words and terms of art, seems to have been the chief purpose of all the former compositions which have borne the title of English Dictionaries. Mr. Johnson has extended his views much farther, and has made a very full collection of all the different meanings of each English word, justified by examples from authors of good reputation. When we compare this book with other dictionaries, the merit of its author appears very extraordinary. . . . The collection of words appears to be very accurate, and must be allowed to be very ample. Most words, we believe, are to be found in the Dictionary, that ever were suspected to be English; but we can not help wishing that the author had trusted less to the judgment of those who may consult him, and had oftener passed his own censure upon those words which are not of approved use, though sometimes to be met with in authors of no mean name. .. We would earnestly recommend it to all who are desirous to improve... their language, frequently to consult the Dictionary. .. Its merits must be determined by the frequent resort that is had to it.

On October the fifteenth of this same year, 1755, appeared a criticism in the form of a letter, written by a Mr. Maxwell who at that time was also working on an English dictionary. His letter, however, failed to make the public await the publication of

his own forthcoming lexicon. In his letter he attacks Johnson's work on two main points: first, as to the extensiveness of his plan, there being included therein no Chaucerian words, no Scotch words, no county-dialects, and no obsolete words found in old Records; and, second, as to the execution of his plan. Under this second point he ascribes to Johnson several faults: first, numerous omissions both of words and their meanings, as an example of which error Maxwell gives a list of seventy birds not named by Johnson; second, omissions not only of Natural History but also of religious sects, of proverbs, of phraseology and idioms, and of particles, which last he illustrates by a comparison of Johnson's thirty heads under the particle As with the ninety-odd to appear in his own work; third, poor etymologies; fourth, confusion in ranging the senses of words; fifth, no exactness of distinction between senses of words having nearly the same signification. After elaborating these points, Maxwell dismisses the subject with a curt "And so much for Mr. Johnson's work," and proceeds to show the superiority of his own dictionary by reproducing therefrom fourteen quarto pages devoted solely to the word Nature, and six more dealing with the verb to assise.

About twenty-five years after the appearance of this remarkable and justifiable though none the less futile letter, there was written another trenchant criticism by John Christopher Adelung, who was publishing an English-German lexicon based largely on Johnson's work. His criticism is seven-fold, dealing with the number of words, the value and dignity of words, the grammatical designation, the etymology, and the principal signification of words, the illustration of words by example, and their practical explanation. Space permits only an excerpt from the passage which deals with the first point, as translated in 1798 by A. F. M. Willich:

Concerning the number and practical use of words, I expected to find the work of Johnson in its greatest perfection. But, in this respect, my disappointment was great. Upon this very point he displays his weakest side. We must however do him the justice to allow, that with respect to terms of science, and written language, his work is very complete; but it is defective in social language, in the language of civil life, and in the terms of arts and manufactures. His defect in the last-mentioned branches, the author himself acknowledges in his preface, and makes this strange apology for it, that he found it impossible to frequent the workshops of mechanics, the mines, magazines, ship-yards, etc. in order to inquire into the different terms and phrases which are peculiar to these pursuits.' Yet this is a great desideratum to foreigners, and considerably detracts from the merit of a work of this nature; for these are the precise cases in which they have most frequent occasion for consulting a Dictionary. . . It will be admitted,

that a dictionary of a language ought to possess the greatest possible degree of completeness, particularly with respect to names and technical terms, which are more rarely employed in common language, and the meaning of which can not be conjectured from the context.

Three years later, 1786, there appeared in Diversions of Purley, Vol. I, an article by Horne-Tooke, a portion of which is interesting enough to quote:

Johnson's merit ought not to be denied to him; but his Dictionary is the most imperfect and faulty, and the least valuable of any of his productions. his Grammar and History, and Dictionary of what he calls the English language, are, in all respects (except the bulk of the latter) most truly contemptible performances; and a reproach to the learning and industry of a nation which receive them with the slightest approbation. Nearly one third of this Dictionary is as much the language of the Hottentots as of the English; and it would be no difficult matter so to translate one of the plainest and most popular numbers of the Spectator into the language of that Dictionary, that no mere Englishman, though well read in his own language, would be able to comprehend one sentence of it.

It appears to be a work of labor, and yet is in truth one of the most idle performances ever offered to the public; compiled by an author who possessed not one single requisite for the undertaking, and (being a publication of a set of booksellers) owing its success to that very circumstance which makes it impossible that it should deserve success.

Less vehement are the opinions of the last critic to be quoted at any length in this paper, Noah Webster. In a letter of October 1807, to Dr. David Ramsay, he says:

Johnson's writings had, in Philology, the effect which Newton's discoveries had in Mathematics, to interrupt for a time the progress of this branch of learning; for when a man has pushed his researches so far beyond his cotemporaries, that all men despair of procceding beyond him, they will naturally consider his principles and decisions as the limit of perfection on that particular subject, and repose their opinions on his authority, without examining into their validity.

In the history of the English Language, the author has proved himself very imperfectly acquainted with the subject. He commences with a most egregious error, in supposing the Saxon language to have been introduced into Britain in the fifth Century, after the Romans had abandoned the island. . . . Equally erroneous is his assertion that the Saxons and Welsh were nations totally distinct. The number of words of Celtic plainly discoverable in the English Language, is much greater than Johnson supposed.

This part of Johnson's work, as well as his Grammar, are wretchedly imperfect. They abound with errors; but the principal fault is, that they contain very few of the material and important facts which would serve to illustrate the history of the language, and of the several nations from which it is derived.

In the Dictionary itself Webster finds seven grounds for complaint. First of all he deplores "the insertion of a multitude of words that do not belong to the language."

As one turns the pages of the Dictionary one runs across such strange wards as adversible, advesperate, adjugate, agriculation, abstrude, injudicable, spicosity, crapulence, morigerous, tenebrosity,