returned to New Haven in 1822, but further work there showed the
insufficiency of material to be had in America; and in 1824, leaving his
family, he took with him a son and set out for Europe, for the purpose
of consulting men and books. He spent two months in Paris, where S. G.
Goodrich met him. "A slender form, with a black coat, black
small-clothes, black silk stockings, moving back and forth, with its
hands behind it, and evidently in a state of meditation. It was a
curious, quaint, Connecticut-looking apparition, strangely in contrast
to the prevailing forms and aspects in this gay metropolis. I said to
myself, 'If it were possible, I should say that was Noah Webster!' I
went up to him and found it was indeed he."

He was satisfied that he should work to better advantage in England. He
went accordingly to Cambridge in the early fall of 1824, and remained
there until the following May, using the resources of the University,
and making such connections as he could, though he found rather barren
sympathy from English scholars, and small encouragement from English
publishers. His training and studies, moreover, were not such as to
place him in very cordial relationship with Englishmen, and his attitude
toward the scholastic deposit of an old nation may be guessed from a
passage in one of his letters home, in which he writes: "The colleges
are mostly old stone buildings, which look very heavy, cold, and gloomy
to an American accustomed to the new public buildings in our country."

There is something in the whole undertaking, and in the mode of its
execution, which makes one by turns wonder at the splendid will and
undaunted perseverance of this Yankee teacher, and feel a well-bred
annoyance at his blindness to the incongruous position which he
occupied. One is disposed to laugh sardonically over this self-taught
dictionary-maker, encamped at Cambridge, coolly pursuing his work of an
American Dictionary of the English Language in the midst of all that
traditional scholarship. But Webster's own consciousness was of the
gravity of his work. "When I finished my copy," he writes in a letter to
Dr. Thomas Miner, "I was sitting at my table in Cambridge, England,
January, 1825. When I arrived at the last word I was seized with a
tremor that made it difficult to proceed. I, however, summoned up
strength to finish the work, and then, walking about the room, I soon
recovered." This may be a faint echo of Gibbon's celebrated pass