Blount’s Glossographia went through many editions down to 1707; but two years after its appearance, Edward Phillips, the son of Milton’s sister Anne, published his New World of Words, which Blount with some reason considered to be largely plagiarized from his book.  He held his peace, however, until Phillips brought out a Law-Dictionary or Nomothetes, also largely copied from his own Nomo-lexicon, when he could refrain himself no longer, and burst upon the world with his indignant pamphlet, ’A World of Errors discovered in the New World of Words, and in Nomothetes or the Interpreter,’ in which he exhibits the proofs of Phillips’s cribbing, and makes wild sport of the cases in which his own errors and misprints had either been copied or muddled by his plagiarist.  The latter did not vouchsafe a reply; he knew a better plan; he quietly corrected in his next edition the mistakes which Blount had so conveniently pointed out, and his ’New World of Words,’ furnished with an engraved frontispiece, containing views of Oxford and Cambridge, and portraits of some Oxford and Cambridge scholars, lived on in successive editions as long as Blount’s.

Time and space forbid me even to recount the later dictionaries of this class and period; we need only mention that of Elisha Coles, a chorister and subsequently matriculated student of Magdalen College (of which his uncle, Elisha Coles, was steward under the Commonwealth), a meritorious work which passed through numerous editions down to 1732; and that of Edward Cocker, the celebrated arithmetician and writing-master of St. George’s, Southwark, by whom people still sometimes asseverate ‘according to Cocker.’  This was published after his death, ‘from the author’s correct copy,’ by John Hawkins, in 1704, with a portrait of the redoubtable Cocker himself in flowing wig and gown, and the following lines:—­

   ’COCKER, who in fair writing did excell,
    And in Arithmetic perform’d as well,
    This necessary work took next in hand,
    That Englishmen might English understand.’

The last edition of Phillips’ New World of Words was edited after his death, with numerous additions, by John Kersey, son of John Kersey the mathematician.  Two years later Kersey threw the materials into another form and published it in an octavo, as Kersey’s ’Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, or a General English Dictionary,’ of which three editions appeared before 1721.  In this work there are included a considerable number of obsolete words, chiefly from Spenser and his contemporaries, marked O., and in some cases erroneously explained.  Professor Skeat has pointed out that this was the source of Chatterton’s Elizabethan vocabulary, and that he took the obsolete words, which he attributed to Rowley, erroneous explanations and all, direct from Kersey’s Dictionary.