Latin-English dictionaries, and traces of it
may still be discovered in the Latin-English dictionaries of to-day.

Of printed English-Latin works, after the _Promptorium_, one of the
earliest was the _Vulgaria_ of William Herman, Headmaster and Provost
of Eton, printed by Pynson in 1519. This is a _Dictionarium_ or _liber
dictionarius_ in the older sense, for it consists of short _dictiones_
or sayings, maxims, and remarks, arranged under subject-headings, such
as _De Pietate_, _De Impietate_, _De corporis dotibus_, _De
Valetudinis cura_, _De Hortensibus_, _De Bellicis_, and finally a
heading _Promiscua_. It may therefore be conceived that it is not easy
to find any particular _dictio_. Horman was originally a Cambridge
man; but, according to Wood, he was elected a Fellow of New College,
Oxford, in 1477, the very year in which Caxton printed his first book
in England, and in this connexion it is interesting to find among the
illustrative sentences in the _Vulgaria_, this reference to the new
art (sign. Oij): 'The prynters haue founde a crafte to make bokes by
brasen letters sette in ordre by a frame,' which is thus latinized:
'Chalcographi artem excogitauerunt imprimendi libros qua literae formis
aereis excudunt.' Of later English-Latin dictionaries two deserve
passing mention: the _Abecedarium_ of Richard Huloet or Howlet, a
native of Wisbech, which appeared in the reign of Edward VI, in 1552,
and the Alvearie of John Baret, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge,
published under Elizabeth in 1573. The Abecedarium, although it gives
the Latin equivalents, may be looked upon to some extent as an English
dictionary, for many of the words have an English explanation, as well
as a Latin rendering; thus _Almesse_, or gift of dryncke, meate, or
money, distributed to the poore, _sporta_, _sportula_; _Amyable_,
pleasante, or hauing a good grace, _amabilis_; _Anabaptistes_, a sorte
of heretyques of late tyme in Germanye about the yere of our Lorde God
1524.... _Anabaptistae_.

Baret's _Alvearie_ of 1573 has been justly styled 'one of the most
quaint and charming of all the early Dictionaries.' In his 'Prefatory
Address to the Reader' the author tells, in fine Elizabethan prose,
both how his book came into existence, and why he gave it its curious
name:--

'About eighteene yeeres agone, hauing pupils at Cambridge
studious of the Latine tongue, I vsed them often to write
Epistles and Theames together, and dailie to tran