des Sciences.’  It is a trite saying that ‘they do these things better in France’; but it is, nevertheless, sometimes true.  Amid all the changes of government which France has seen in modern times, it has never been forgotten that the history of the French language, and of French letters and French science, is part of the history of France; the British government has not even now attained to the standpoint of recognizing this:  among the historical documents published under the direction of the authorities of the Record Office, there is no series illustrating the history of the language, the literature, or the science of England.

Next to French, the continental languages most important to Englishmen in the sixteenth century, were Italian and Spanish, of both of which, accordingly, dictionaries were published before the end of the century[7].  In 1599 Richard Percevall, Gent., published his dictionary in Spanish and English; and in the same year ‘resolute John Florio’ (who in his youth resided in Worcester Place, Oxford, and was matriculated at Magdalen College in 1581) brought out his Italian-English Dictionary, the World of Words, which he re-published in a much enlarged form in 1611, with dedication to the Queen of James I, as Queen Anna’s New World of Words.  This year, also, Randall Cotgrave published his famous French-English Dictionary, which afterwards passed through so many editions.  In the absence as yet of any merely English dictionary, the racy English vocabulary of Florio and Cotgrave is of exceeding value, and has been successfully employed in illustrating the contemporary language of Shakspere, to whom Florio, patronized as he was by the Earls of Southampton and Pembroke, was probably personally known.  Thus, the same year which saw England provided with the version of the Bible which was to be so intimately identified with the language of the next three centuries, saw her also furnished with adequate dictionaries of French, Italian, and Spanish; and, in 1617, a still more ambitious work was accomplished by John Minsheu in the production of a polyglot dictionary of English with ten other languages, British or Welsh, Low Dutch, High Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, which he entitled ’[Greek:  Haegemon eis tas glossas], id est Ductor in Linguas, the Guide into Tongues.’

But though in these works there is necessarily contained much of the material of an English dictionary, so that we can from them recover most of the current vocabulary, no one appears before the end of the sixteenth century to have felt that Englishmen could want a dictionary to help them to the knowledge and correct use of their own language.  That language was either an in-born faculty, or it was inhaled with their native air, or imbibed with their mothers’ milk; how could they need a book to teach them to speak their mother-tongue?  To the scholars of the Renascence the notion would