A friend and louer of thy paines,
IOHN FORD.

And a deeply interesting little book is this diminutive ancestor of the modern English Dictionary, to describe which adequately would take far more time than the limits of this lecture afford.  It is divided into three parts:  Part I contains the hard words with their explanation in ordinary language; and instructive it is to see what words were then considered hard and unknown.  Many of them certainly would be so still:  as, for example, abgregate, ’to lead out of the flock’; acersecomick, ‘one whose hair was never cut’; adcorporated, ‘married’; adecastick, ’one that will do just howsoever’; bubulcitate, ‘to cry like a cow-boy’; collocuplicate, ’to enrich’—­concerning which we wonder who used them, or where Cockeram found them; but we are surprised to find among these hard words abandon, abhorre, abrupt, absurd, action, activitie, and actresse, explained as ‘a woman doer,’ for the stage actress had not yet appeared. Blunder, ‘to bestir oneself,’ and Garble, ’to clense things from dust,’ remind us that the meanings of words are subject to change.  The Second Part contains the ordinary words ‘explained’ by their hard equivalents, and is intended to teach a learned style.  The plain man or gentlewoman may write a letter in his or her natural language, and then by turning up the simple words in the dictionary alter them into their learned equivalents.  Thus ‘abound’ may be altered into exuperate, ‘too great plenty’ into uberty, ‘he and I are of one age’ into we are coetaneous, ‘youthful babbling’ into juvenile inaniloquence—­a useful expression to hurl at an opponent in the Oxford Union.

The last part is the most entertaining of all:  it is headed ’The Third Part, treating of Gods and Goddesses, Men and Women, Boyes and Maides, Giants and Diuels, Birds and Beasts, Monsters and Serpents, Wells and Riuers, Herbes, Stones, Trees, Dogges, Fishes, and the like’; it is a key to the allusions to classical, historical, mythological, and other marvellous persons, animals, and things, to be met with in polite literature.  A good example of its contents is the well-known article on the Crocodile:—­

’Crocodile, a beast hatched of an egge, yet some of them grow to a great bignesse, as 10. 20. or 30. foot in length:  it hath cruell teeth and scaly back, with very sharpe clawes on his feete:  if it see a man afraid of him, it will eagerly pursue him, but on the contrary, if he be assaulted he wil shun him.  Hauing eaten the body of a man, it will weepe ouer the head, but in fine eate the head also:  thence came the Prouerb, he shed Crocodile teares, viz., fayned teares.’

Appreciation of Cockeram’s ‘Dictionarie’ was marked by the numerous editions through which it passed down as late as 1659.  Meanwhile Thomas Blount, Barrister of the Inner Temple, and correspondent of Anthony a Wood, was devoting the leisure hours of twenty years to his ’Glossographia:  or a Dictionary interpreting all such hard words, whether Hebrew, Greek, Latin,’ etc., ’as are now used in our refined English Tongue,’ of which the first edition saw the light in 1656.