issued from the Johnsonian
presses against the wretch who could thus sully his book and corrupt the
language!" He criticises the accuracy with which Johnson has
discriminated the different senses of the same word, and words nearly
synonymous. The illustrative quotations which bear so much of the praise
bestowed upon Johnson's Dictionary he declares to be one of the most
exceptionable features, both because no small number of the examples are
taken from authors who did not write the language with purity, and
because a still larger number throw no light upon the definitions, and
are frequently entirely unnecessary. He cites on this last point the
passages under the word _alley_, five in all, from Spenser, Bacon,
Milton, Dryden, and Pope. "Does any reader of English want all these
authorities to show the word to be legitimate? Far from it, nineteen
twentieths of all our words are so common that they require no proof at
all of legitimacy. Yet the example here given is by no means the most
exceptionable for the number of authorities cited. The author sometimes
offers thirty or forty lines to illustrate words which every man, woman,
and child understands as well as Johnson. Thirty-five lines of
exemplification under the word _froth_, for example, are just as useless
in explaining the word as would be the same number of lines from the
language of the Six Nations."

His final charge rests on the inaccuracy of the etymology. "As this has
been generally considered the least important part of a dictionary the
subject has been little investigated, and is very imperfectly
understood, even by men of science. Johnson scarcely entered the
threshold of the subject. He consulted chiefly Junius and Skinner; the
latter of whom was not possessed of learning adequate to the
investigation, and Junius, like Vossius, Scaliger, and most other
etymologists on the Continent, labored to deduce all languages from the
Greek. Hence these authors neglected the principal sources of
information, which were to be found only in the north of Europe, and in
the west of Ireland and Scotland. In another particular they all failed
of success; they never discovered some of the principal modes in which
the primitive radical words were combined to form the more modern
compounds. On this subject, therefore, almost _everything remains to be
done_.... I can assure the American public that the errors in Johnson's
Dictionary are ten times as numerous as they suppose; a