he mistakes
which Blount had so conveniently pointed out, and his 'New World of
Words,' furnished with an engraved frontispiece, containing views of
Oxford and Cambridge, and portraits of some Oxford and Cambridge
scholars, lived on in successive editions as long as Blount's.

Time and space forbid me even to recount the later dictionaries of
this class and period; we need only mention that of Elisha Coles, a
chorister and subsequently matriculated student of Magdalen College
(of which his uncle, Elisha Coles, was steward under the
Commonwealth), a meritorious work which passed through numerous
editions down to 1732; and that of Edward Cocker, the celebrated
arithmetician and writing-master of St. George's, Southwark, by whom
people still sometimes asseverate 'according to Cocker.' This was
published after his death, 'from the author's correct copy,' by John
Hawkins, in 1704, with a portrait of the redoubtable Cocker himself in
flowing wig and gown, and the following lines:--

'COCKER, who in fair writing did excell,
And in Arithmetic perform'd as well,
This necessary work took next in hand,
That Englishmen might English understand.'

The last edition of Phillips' _New World of Words_ was edited after
his death, with numerous additions, by John Kersey, son of John Kersey
the mathematician. Two years later Kersey threw the materials into
another form and published it in an octavo, as Kersey's '_Dictionarium
Anglo-Britannicum_, or a General English Dictionary,' of which three
editions appeared before 1721. In this work there are included a
considerable number of obsolete words, chiefly from Spenser and his
contemporaries, marked O., and in some cases erroneously explained.
Professor Skeat has pointed out that this was the source of
Chatterton's Elizabethan vocabulary, and that he took the obsolete
words, which he attributed to Rowley, erroneous explanations and all,
direct from Kersey's Dictionary.

More than 100 years had now elapsed since Robert Cawdrey prepared his
'Table Alphabeticall,' and nearly a century since the work of
Cockeram; and all the dictionaries which had meanwhile appeared,
although their size had steadily increased, were, in purpose and fact,
only what these works had been--Vocabularies of 'Hard Words,' not of
words in general. The notion that an English Dictionary ought to
contain _all_ English words had apparently as yet occurred to no one;
at least no one had proposed to carry t