ersity of Michigan_
EDWARD NILES HOOKER, _University of California, Los Angeles_
H. T. SWEDENBERG, JR., _University of California, Los Angeles_

_ASSISTANT EDITOR_

W. EARL BRITTON, _University of Michigan_

_ADVISORY EDITORS_

EMMETT L. AVERY, _State College of Washington_
BENJAMIN BOYCE, _University of Nebraska_
LOUIS I. BREDVOLD, _University of Michigan_
CLEANTH BROOKS, Yale University
JAMES L. CLIFFORD, _Columbia University_
ARTHUR FRIEDMAN, _University of Chicago_
SAMUEL H. MONK, _University of Minnesota_
ERNEST MOSSNER, _University of Texas_
JAMES SUTHERLAND, _Queen Mary College, London_

Lithoprinted from copy supplied by author
by
Edwards Brothers, Inc.
Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A.
1948

_INTRODUCTION_

The two tracts reprinted here, as well as Swift's _Proposal for
correcting, improving and ascertaining the English tongue_, which
occasioned them, may be viewed in the context of the many seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century suggestions for the formation of a British
Academy. They are in part a result of the founding of the French Academy
in 1635, although the feeling in England that language needed regulating
to prevent its corruption and decline was not purely derivative. By the
close of the seventeenth century an informed Englishman might have been
familiar with a series of native proposals, ranging from those of Carew
of Antony and Edmund Bolton early in the century to that of Defoe at the
close. Among the familiar figures who urged the advantages of an Academy
were Evelyn, the Earl of Roscommon, and Dryden. Of these Dryden was
particularly vocal; but Evelyn's suggestion, associated as it was with
the Royal Society, was rather more spectacular. In 1665 he set forth for
the Society's Committee for Improving the Language an exhaustive
catalogue of the forces tending to the corruption of the English tongue.
Those, he declared, are "victories, plantations, frontiers, staples of
commerce, pedantry of schools, affectation of travellers, translations,
fancy and style of court, vernility and mincing of citizens, pulpits,
political remonstrances, theatres, shops, &c." There follows Evelyn's
careful formulation of the problems facing those who would refine the
language and fix its standards.

This sense of the corruption of the language and of the urgent need for
regulation was communicated to the eighteenth century, in which a number
of powerful voices called f