one
sees the subject from the side of nationality, the other from that of
literature. Webster is thinking of his own people, Johnson of the
un-national tribe of scholars and men of letters. The historical
associations justify each, for Johnson was distinctly the member of a
great class which was beginning to assert its independence of social
authority. With all his loyalty to his king, he was at heart a
republican in literature, and stoutly denied the divine right of
patrons. His dictionary was the sign of literary emancipation; it was
the witness to an intellectual freedom which might be in alliance with
government, but could not be its tool. The history of English literature
since that date is a democratic history. Webster, on his part, was the
prophet of a national independence, in which language and literature
were involved as inseparable elements. To him books were neither the
production nor the possession of a class, but necessarily incident to
the life of a free people. Hence, in his citation of American
authorities, he is undaunted by the paucity of purely literary men; law
reports and state documents answer his purpose as well. He saw
literature as the accompaniment of self-government, and the dictionary
in his eyes was a vast school-book, not a thesaurus of literature.

I can hardly expect my readers to follow me patiently through a close
examination of the successive editions of Webster's large dictionary,
and I have no such high opinion of my own patience as to suppose that I
should continue on the road after my readers had dropped behind; but it
is possible to make a rough comparison of the first edition of 1828 and
the latest of 1880, in order to see what Webster did which needed to be
undone, and to form some estimate of the substantial service which he
rendered lexicography in that edition which was more nearly his sole and
unaided work.

To take, then, the matter of orthography, there are certain general
classes of words which have borne the brunt of criticism. In his first
edition Webster's rule was to omit _k_ after _c_ from the end of all
words of more than one syllable, and to retain it in longer forms of the
same word only when it was required to defend the hard sound of c. He
wrote thus: _public_, _publication_. But Webster, like writers of
to-day, was constantly allowing his uniform rule to give way in cases
where custom had fastened upon him. Thus he still spelled _traffick_,
_almanack_, _frol