Psalms'; and who, if pressed as
to the authorship of these works, would certainly say that 'the
Psalms' were composed by David, and 'the Dictionary' by Dr. Johnson.

I have met persons of intelligence who supposed that if Dr. Johnson
was not the sole author of 'the Dictionary'--a notion which, in view
of the 'pushfulness' wherewith, in recent times, Dictionaries,
American and other, have been pressed upon public notice, is now not
so easily tenable--he was, at least, the 'original author,' from whose
capacious brain that work first emanated. Whereas, in truth, Dr.
Johnson had been preceded by scores of workers, each of whom had added
his stone or stones to the lexicographic cairn, which had already
risen to goodly proportions when Johnson made to it his own splendid
contribution.

For, the English Dictionary, like the English Constitution, is the
creation of no one man, and of no one age; it is a growth that has
slowly developed itself adown the ages. Its beginnings lie far back in
times almost prehistoric. And these beginnings themselves, although
the English Dictionary of to-day is lineally developed from them, were
neither Dictionaries, nor even English. As to their language, they
were in the first place and principally Latin: as to their substance,
they consisted, in large part at least, of _glosses_. They were Latin,
because at the time to which we refer, the seventh and eighth
centuries of our era, Latin was in Western Europe the only language of
books, the learning of Latin the portal to all learning. And they were
_glosses_ in this wise: the possessor of a Latin book, or the member
of a religious community which were the fortunate possessors of
half-a-dozen books, in his ordinary reading of this literature, here
and there came across a difficult word which lay outside the familiar
Latin vocabulary. When he had ascertained the meaning of this, he
often, as a help to his own memory, and a friendly service to those
who might handle the book after him, wrote the meaning over the word
in the original text, in a smaller hand, sometimes in easier Latin,
sometimes, if he knew no Latin equivalent, in a word of his own
vernacular. Such an explanatory word written over a word of the text
is a _gloss_. Nearly all the Latin MSS. of religious or practical
treatises, that have come down to us from the Middle Ages, contain
examples of such glosses, sometimes few, sometimes many. It may
naturally be supposed that this glossin