they are adduced, that is, they usually contain the word for
which they are quoted, and the context is more or less accurately
rendered. But in some cases it is otherwise: Johnson's memory played
him false, and he quotes a passage for a word that it does not
actually contain. As an example, under _Distilment_ he correctly
quotes from _Hamlet_, 'And in the porches of mine ears did pour the
leperous distilment.' But when he reached _Instilment_, his memory
became vague, and forgetting that he had already quoted the passage
under _Distilment_, he quoted it again as 'the leperous instilment'--a
reading which does not exist in any text of Shakspere, and was a mere
temporary hallucination of memory. There are some other curious
mistakes, which must, I suppose, have crept in either in the course of
transcription or of printing. As specimens I mention two, because they
have unfortunately perverted ordinary usage. The two words _Coco_ and
_Cocoa_--the former a Portuguese word[12], naming the _coco-nut_, the
fruit of a palm-tree; the latter a latinized form of _Cacao_, the
Aztec name of a Central American shrub, whence we have cocoa and
chocolate--were always distinguished down to Johnson's time, and were
in fact distinguished by Johnson himself in his own writings. His
account of these in the Dictionary is quoted from Miller's _Gardener's
Dictionary_ and Hill's _Materia Medica_, in which the former is spelt
_coco_ and the latter _cacao_ and _cocoa_. But in Johnson's Dictionary
the two words are by some accident run together under the heading
_cocoa_, with the disastrous result that modern vulgar usage mixes the
two up, spells the _coco-nut_, 'cocoa-' as if it were _co-co-a_, and
on the other hand pronounces _cocoa_, the cacao-bean and the beverage,
as if it were _coco_. The word _dispatch_, from It. _dispaccio_, had
been in English use for some 250 years when Johnson's Dictionary
appeared, and had been correctly spelt by everybody (that is by
everybody but the illiterate) with dis-. This was Johnson's own
spelling both before and after he published the dictionary, as may be
seen in his _Letters_ edited by Dr. G. Birkbeck Hill[13]. It was also
the spelling of all the writers whom Johnson quoted. But by some
inexplicable error, the word got into the dictionary as _despatch_,
and this spelling was even substituted in most of the quotations. I
have not found that a single writer followed this erroneous spelling
in the eighteenth cen