During the second quarter of the century, the feeling arose among literary men, as well as among the booksellers, that the time had come for the preparation of a ‘Standard Dictionary’ of the English tongue.  The language had now attained a high degree of literary perfection; a perfect prose style, always a characteristic of maturity, had been created; a brilliant galaxy of dramatists and essayists—­Dryden, Pope, Addison, Steele, Swift, Defoe—­had demonstrated that English was capable of expressing clearly and elegantly everything that needed to be expressed in language.  The age of Queen Anne was compared to the Ciceronian age of Latin, or the age of Aristotle and Plato in Greek.  But in both these cases, as indeed in that of every known ancient people, the language, after reaching its acme of perfection, had begun to decay and become debased:  the golden age of Latinity had passed into a silvern, and that into a brazen and an iron age.  The fear was that a like fate should overtake English also; to avert which calamity the only remedy appeared to be to fix the language by means of a ‘Standard Dictionary,’ which should register the proper sense and use of every word and phrase, from which no polite writer henceforth would be expected to deviate; but, even as generation after generation of boys and men found their perfection of Latinity in the imitation of Cicero, so all succeeding ages of Englishmen should find their ideal of speech and writing fixed for ever in this standard dictionary.  To us of a later age, with our fuller knowledge of the history of language, and our wider experience of its fortunes, when it has to be applied to entirely new fields of knowledge, such as have been opened to us since the birth of modern science, this notion seems childlike and pathetic.  But it was eminently characteristic of the eighteenth century, an age of staid and decorous subsidence from the energetic restlessness of the seventeenth—­an age in which men eschewed revolution and innovation, and devoted themselves assiduously to conserve, consolidate, polish, refine, and make the best of what they had.

In this notion of ascertaining, purifying, refining, and fixing the language, England was only following in the wake of some other countries.  In Italy the Accademia della Crusca, and in France the Academie francaise, had been instituted for this very purpose, and the latter had, after twenty years of preparation, and forty more years of work, published the first edition of a dictionary in which the French language was (fondly and vainly) supposed to be thus ascertained, sifted, and fixed for ever.  England had no Academy; but it was thought that what had been done in France by the Forty Immortals might perhaps be done here by some leading man of letters.  The idea had, it appears, been put before Alexander Pope, and approved by him; he is said even to have drawn up a list of the authors whose writings might be taken as authorities for such a dictionary; but