of maturity, had been
created; a brilliant galaxy of dramatists and essayists--Dryden, Pope,
Addison, Steele, Swift, Defoe--had demonstrated that English was
capable of expressing clearly and elegantly everything that needed to
be expressed in language. The age of Queen Anne was compared to the
Ciceronian age of Latin, or the age of Aristotle and Plato in Greek.
But in both these cases, as indeed in that of every known ancient
people, the language, after reaching its acme of perfection, had begun
to decay and become debased: the golden age of Latinity had passed
into a silvern, and that into a brazen and an iron age. The fear was
that a like fate should overtake English also; to avert which calamity
the only remedy appeared to be to _fix the language_ by means of a
'Standard Dictionary,' which should register the proper sense and use
of every word and phrase, from which no polite writer henceforth would
be expected to deviate; but, even as generation after generation of
boys and men found their perfection of Latinity in the imitation of
Cicero, so all succeeding ages of Englishmen should find their ideal
of speech and writing fixed for ever in this standard dictionary. To
us of a later age, with our fuller knowledge of the history of
language, and our wider experience of its fortunes, when it has to be
applied to entirely new fields of knowledge, such as have been opened
to us since the birth of modern science, this notion seems childlike
and pathetic. But it was eminently characteristic of the eighteenth
century, an age of staid and decorous subsidence from the energetic
restlessness of the seventeenth--an age in which men eschewed
revolution and innovation, and devoted themselves assiduously to
conserve, consolidate, polish, refine, and make the best of what they
had.

In this notion of ascertaining, purifying, refining, and fixing the
language, England was only following in the wake of some other
countries. In Italy the _Accademia della Crusca_, and in France the
_Academie francaise_, had been instituted for this very purpose, and
the latter had, after twenty years of preparation, and forty more
years of work, published the first edition of a dictionary in which
the French language was (fondly and vainly) supposed to be thus
ascertained, sifted, and fixed for ever. England had no Academy; but
it was thought that what had been done in France by the Forty
Immortals might perhaps be done here by some leading man of let