which are
to teach their structures and relations.

My purpose was to admit no testimony of living authors, that I might not
be misled by partiality, and that none of my contemporaries might have
reason to complain; nor have I departed from this resolution, but when
some performance of uncommon excellence excited my veneration, when my
memory supplied me from late books with an example that was wanting, or
when my heart, in the tenderness of friendship, solicited admission for
a favourite name.

So far have I been from any care to grace my pages with modern
decorations, that I have studiously endeavoured to collect examples and
authorities from the writers before the Restoration, whose works I
regard as _the wells of English undefiled_, as the pure sources of
genuine diction. Our language, for almost a century, has, by the
concurrence of many causes, been gradually departing from its original
Teutonick character, and deviating towards a Gallick structure and
phraseology[2], from which it ought to be our endeavour to recall it, by
making our ancient volumes the ground-work of style, admitting among the
additions of later times only such as may supply real deficiencies, such
as are readily adopted by the genius of our tongue, and incorporate
easily with our native idioms.

But as every language has a time of rudeness antecedent to perfection,
as well as of false refinement and declension, I have been cautious lest
my zeal for antiquity might drive me into times too remote, and crowd my
book with words now no longer understood. I have fixed Sidney's work for
the boundary, beyond which I make few excursions. From the authors which
rose in the time of Elizabeth, a speech might be formed adequate to all
the purposes of use and elegance. If the language of theology were
extracted from Hooker and the translation of the Bible; the terms of
natural knowledge from Bacon; the phrases of policy, war, and navigation
from Raleigh; the dialect of poetry and fiction from Spenser and Sidney;
and the diction of common life from Shakespeare, few ideas would be lost
to mankind, for want of English words, in which they might be expressed.

It is not sufficient that a word is found, unless it be so combined as
that its meaning is apparently determined by the tract and tenour of the
sentence; such passages I have, therefore, chosen, and when it happened
that any author gave a definition of a term, or such an explanation as
is equivalent to