uthors
back to the year 1300, and probably for the first time made Chaucer
and Gower and Piers Ploughman living names to many readers. And his
special notion was quite correct _in theory_. Quotations _will_ tell
the full meaning of a word, _if one has enough of them_; but it takes
a great many to be enough, and it takes a reader a long time to read
and weigh all the quotations, and to deduce from them the meanings
which might be put before him in a line or two. As a fact, while
Richardson's notion was correct in theory, mundane conditions of space
and time rendered it humanly impracticable. Nevertheless, the mass of
quotations, most of them with exact references, collected by him, and
printed under the word-groups which they illustrated, was a service
never to be undervalued or forgotten, and his work, 'A New Dictionary
of the English Language ... Illustrated by Quotations from the best
Authors' by Charles Richardson, LL.D., 1836-7, still continues to be a
valuable repertory of illustrations.

Such was the position of English lexicography in the middle of the
nineteenth century, when the late Dr. Trench, then Dean of
Westminster, who had already written several esteemed works on the
English language and the history of words, read two papers before the
Philological Society in London 'On some Deficiencies in existing
English Dictionaries,' in which, while speaking with much appreciation
of the labours of Dr. Johnson and his successors, he declared that
these labours yet fell far short of giving us the ideal English
Dictionary. Especially, he pointed out that for the _history_ of words
and families of words, and for the changes of form and sense which
words had historically passed through, they gave hardly any help
whatever. No one could find out from all the dictionaries extant how
long any particular word had been in the language, which of the many
senses in which many words were used was the original, or how or when
these many senses had been developed; nor, in the case of words
described as _obsolete_, were we told _when_ they became obsolete or
by whom they were last used. He pointed out also that the obsolete and
the rarer words of the language had never been completely collected;
that thousands of words current in the literature of the past three
centuries had escaped the diligence of Johnson and all his
supplementers; that, indeed, the collection of the requisite material
for a complete dictionary could not be com