even now the native dictionaries of some Oriental languages
are often not in alphabetical order; in such a language as Chinese,
indeed, there is no alphabetical order in which to place the words,
and they follow each other in the dictionary in a purely arbitrary and
conventional fashion. In English, as we have seen, many of the
vocabularies from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, were arranged
under class-headings according to subject; and, although Sir Thomas
Elyot's Dictionary was actually in alphabetical order, that of J.
Withals, published in 1554, under the title 'A short dictionarie for
young beginners,' and with the colophon 'Thus endeth this Dictionary
very useful for Children, compiled by J. Withals,' reverts to the
older arrangement of subject-classes, as Names of things in the AEther
or skie, the xii Signes, the vii Planets, Tymes, Seasons, Other times
in the yere, the daies of the weeke, the Ayre, the viii windes, the
iiii partes of the worlde, Byrdes, Bees, Flies, and other, the Water,
the Sea, Fishes, a Shippe with other Water vessels, the earth,
Mettales, Serpents, woorms and creepinge beastes, Foure-footed
beastes, &c.[6]

It is unnecessary in this lecture to recount even the names of the
Latin-English and English-Latin dictionaries of the sixteenth century.
It need only be mentioned that there were six successive and
successively enlarged editions of Sir Thomas Elyot; that the last
three of these were edited by Thomas Cooper, 'Schole-Maister of
Maudlens in Oxford' (the son of an Oxford tradesman, and educated as a
chorister in Magdalen College School, who rose to be Dean of Christ
Church and Vice-Chancellor of the University, and to hold successively
the episcopal sees of Lincoln and Winchester), and that Cooper, in
1565, published his great _Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae_,
'opera et industria Thomae Cooperi Magdalenensis,' founded upon the
great French work of Robert Stephens (Estienne), the learned French
scholar and printer. Of this work Martin Marprelate says in his
_Epistle_ (Arber, p. 42), 'His Lordship of Winchester is a great
Clarke, for he hath translated his Dictionarie, called Cooper's
Dictionarie, verbatim out of Robert Stephanus his _Thesaurus_, and
ill-favoured too, they say!' This was, however, the criticism of an
adversary; Cooper had added to Stephens's work many accessions from
his editions of Sir Thomas Elyot, and other sources; his _Thesaurus_
was the basis of later