have seemed absurd—­as absurd as it has seemed to some of their descendants in the nineteenth century, that an English grammar-school or an English university should trouble itself about such aboriginal products of the English skull, as English language and literature.  But by the end of the sixteenth century, as by the end of the nineteenth, there was a moving of the waters:  the Renascence of ancient learning had itself brought into English use thousands of learned words, from Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and other languages, ‘ink-horn terms,’ as they were called by Bale and by Puttenham, unknown to, and not to be imbibed from, mother or grandmother.  A work exhibiting the spelling, and explaining the meaning, of these new-fangle ‘hard words’ was the felt want of the day; and the first attempt to supply it marks, on the whole, the most important point in the evolution of the modern English Dictionary.

In 1604, Robert Cawdrey, who had been a schoolmaster at Okeham, and afterwards at Coventry, published a modest octavo of 120 pages, 5-1/2 inches by 3-1/2, calling itself The Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words, in which he set forth the proper spelling and meaning of some 3,000 of these learned terms; his work reached a third edition in 1612[8].  In 1616, Dr. John Bullokar, then resident in Chichester, followed with a work of the same kind and size, named by him An English Expositor, of which numerous editions came out, one as late as 1684.  And in 1623 appeared the work which first assumed the title of ‘The English Dictionarie,’ by H.C., Gent.  H.C., we learn from the dedication, was Henry Cockeram, to whom John Ford the dramatist addressed the following congratulatory lines:—­

   To my industrious friend, the Author of this English Dictionarie,
   MR. HENRY COCKRAM OF EXETER.

   Borne in the West? liue there? so far from Court? 
   From Oxford, Cambridge, London? yet report
   (Now in these daies of Eloquence) such change
   Of words? vnknown? vntaught? tis new and strange. 
   Let Gallants therefore skip no more from hence
   To Italic, France, Spaine, and with expence
   Waste time and faire estates, to learne new fashions
   Of complementall phrases, soft temptations
   To glorious beggary:  Here let them hand
   This Booke; here studie, reade, and vnderstand: 
   Then shall they find varietie at Home,
   As curious as at Paris, or at Rome. 
   For my part I confesse, hadst not thou writ,
   I had not beene acquainted with more wit
   Than our old English taught; but now I can
   Be proud to know I have a Countryman
   Hath strugled for a fame, and what is more,
   Gain’d it by paths of Art, vntrod before. 
   The benefit is generall; the crowne
   Of praise particular, and thats thine owne. 
   What should I say? thine owne deserts inspire thee,
   Twere base to enuie, I must then admire thee.