usions to classical, historical, mythological, and other
marvellous persons, animals, and things, to be met with in polite
literature. A good example of its contents is the well-known article
on the _Crocodile_:--

'_Crocodile_, a beast hatched of an egge, yet some of them
grow to a great bignesse, as 10. 20. or 30. foot in length:
it hath cruell teeth and scaly back, with very sharpe clawes
on his feete: if it see a man afraid of him, it will eagerly
pursue him, but on the contrary, if he be assaulted he wil
shun him. Hauing eaten the body of a man, it will weepe ouer
the head, but in fine eate the head also: thence came the
Prouerb, he shed Crocodile teares, viz., fayned teares.'

Appreciation of Cockeram's 'Dictionarie' was marked by the numerous
editions through which it passed down as late as 1659. Meanwhile
Thomas Blount, Barrister of the Inner Temple, and correspondent of
Anthony a Wood, was devoting the leisure hours of twenty years to his
'_Glossographia_: or a Dictionary interpreting all such hard words,
whether Hebrew, Greek, Latin,' etc., 'as are now used in our refined
English Tongue,' of which the first edition saw the light in 1656.

I suppose it is a truism, that the higher position now taken by
English studies, is intimately interwoven with the advances which have
been made during the last quarter of a century in the higher education
of women, and that but for the movement to let women share in the
advantages of a university education, it is doubtful whether the
nineteenth century would have witnessed the establishment of a School
of English Language and Literature at Oxford. In connexion with this
it is a noteworthy fact, that the preparation of these early
seventeenth century English dictionaries was also largely due to a
consideration of the educational wants of women. The 'Table
Alphabeticall' of Robert Cawdrey, which was dedicated to five 'right
honourable, Worshipfull, vertuous, and godlie Ladies[9],' the sisters
of his former pupil, Sir James Harrington, Knight, bears on its
title-page that it is 'gathered for the benefit and help of Ladies,
Gentlewomen, or any other vnskilfull persons.' Bullokar's _Expositor_
was dedicated 'to the Right Honorable and Vertvovs his Singvlar Good
Ladie, the Ladie Jane Viscountesse Mountague,' under whose patronage
he hoped to see the work 'perhaps gracefully admitted among greatest
Ladies and studious Gentlewomen, to whose reading (I am m