by the
exercise of individual caprice and of a personal authority, which had
grown out of his long-continued and solitary labor, he attached his own
name to it. Both names remain. The existing Dictionary is "An American
Dictionary of the English Language," and bears indubitable evidence of
its application to American use, but it is no longer the organ of an
over-zealous patriotism. It bears Noah Webster's name on the title-page,
but the work has been revised, not out of all likeness to its original
form, but with a fullness and precision which, being impossible to any
one man, required the cooperation of a company of scholars. His original
Preface to the edition of 1828 has been preserved as a memento of his
attitude in the presence of his great work, but his Introduction and
Advertisement and Grammar of the English Language have been swept away,
and their place supplied by the maturer and more scholarly work of
Webster's successors.

It has been said by some nice critic, anxious to be just before he was
generous, that the book commonly known as Webster's Dictionary,
sometimes, with a ponderous familiarity, as The Unabridged, should more
properly be called The Webster Dictionary, as indicating the fact that
the original private enterprise had, as it were, been transformed into a
joint stock company, which might, out of courtesy, take the name of the
once founder but now merely honorary member of the literary firm engaged
in the manufacture and arrangement of words. Indeed, the name Webster
has been associated with such a vast number of dictionaries of all sizes
and weights, that it has become to many a most impersonal term, and we
may almost expect in a few generations to find the word "Webster"
defined in some revised edition of the Unabridged as the colloquial word
for a Dictionary. The bright-eyed, bird-like looking gentleman who faces
the title-page of his Dictionary may be undergoing some metempsychosis,
but the student of American literature will at any time have little
difficulty in rescuing his personality from unseemly transmigration,
and, by the aid of historical glasses, may discover that the Dictionary
maker, far from being either the arid, bloodless being which his work
supposes, or the reckless disturber of philological peace which his
enemies aver, was an exceedingly vigilant, determined American
school-master, who had enormous faith in his country, and an uncommon
self-reliance, by which he undertook sin