among the historical
documents published under the direction of the authorities of the
Record Office, there is no series illustrating the history of the
language, the literature, or the science of England.

Next to French, the continental languages most important to Englishmen
in the sixteenth century, were Italian and Spanish, of both of which,
accordingly, dictionaries were published before the end of the
century[7]. In 1599 Richard Percevall, Gent., published his dictionary
in Spanish and English; and in the same year 'resolute John Florio'
(who in his youth resided in Worcester Place, Oxford, and was
matriculated at Magdalen College in 1581) brought out his
Italian-English Dictionary, the _World of Words_, which he
re-published in a much enlarged form in 1611, with dedication to the
Queen of James I, as _Queen Anna's New World of Words_. This year,
also, Randall Cotgrave published his famous French-English Dictionary,
which afterwards passed through so many editions. In the absence as
yet of any merely English dictionary, the racy English vocabulary of
Florio and Cotgrave is of exceeding value, and has been successfully
employed in illustrating the contemporary language of Shakspere, to
whom Florio, patronized as he was by the Earls of Southampton and
Pembroke, was probably personally known. Thus, the same year which saw
England provided with the version of the Bible which was to be so
intimately identified with the language of the next three centuries,
saw her also furnished with adequate dictionaries of French, Italian,
and Spanish; and, in 1617, a still more ambitious work was
accomplished by John Minsheu in the production of a polyglot
dictionary of English with ten other languages, British or Welsh, Low
Dutch, High Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Greek,
and Hebrew, which he entitled '[Greek: Haegemon eis tas glossas], id
est _Ductor in Linguas_, the Guide into Tongues.'

But though in these works there is necessarily contained much of the
material of an English dictionary, so that we can from them recover
most of the current vocabulary, no one appears before the end of the
sixteenth century to have felt that Englishmen could want a dictionary
to help them to the knowledge and correct use of their own language.
That language was either an in-born faculty, or it was inhaled with
their native air, or imbibed with their mothers' milk; how could they
need a book to teach them to speak their mo