404 Essay on
��of that noble addition to our language, that his old friend did not live to see the triumph of his labours. In May 1755, that great work was published T . Johnson was desirous that it should come from one who had obtained academical honours ; and for that purpose, his friend the Rev. Thomas Warton obtained for him, in the preceding month of February, a diploma for a master's degree from the University of Oxford 2 . Garrick, on the publi cation of the Dictionary, wrote the following lines.
' Talk of war with a Briton, he '11 boldly advance, That one English soldier can [will] beat ten of France. Would we alter the boast from the sword to the pen, Our odds are still greater, still greater our men. In the deep mines of science though Frenchmen may toil, Can their strength be compar'd to Locke, Newton, or [and] Boyle ? Let them rally their heroes, send forth all their pow'rs, Their versemen and prosemen, then match them with ours. First Shakspeare and Milton [Milton and Shakspeare], like Gods
in the fight,
Have put their whole drama and epic to flight. In satires, epistles, and odes, would they cope ? Their numbers retreat before Dry den and Pope. And Johnson well arm'd, like a hero of yore, Has beat Forty French, and will beat Forty more *.
It is, perhaps, needless to mention, that Forty was the number of the French Academy, at the time when their Dictionary was published to settle their language 4 .
1 Life, i. 290, n. i. I have seen a ment to the London Evening Post. letter from Mr. John P. Anderson of Some authorities give the date of the the British Museum, the author of second edition as 1755, others 1756, the Bibliography at the end of but they are all wrong. The ad- Colonel F. Grant's Johnson, to Mr. vertisement of the first edition gives J. Dewitt Miller, of Philadelphia, a the date " This day is published " great Johnsonian collector, in which April 17, not as usually accepted, it is stated: 'The first edition ap- April 15.' peared on April 17, 1755. What My edition of the Dictionary, called I called a second edition was a the second, is dated 1755 in the first weekly re-issue, same type, &c., volume, and 1756 in the second, which began on June 17 of the same The sheets are numbered from i to year. The second edition appeared clxv. in 1760, in 2 vols. octavo. I have 2 Life, i. 275, 283. discovered this from the advertise- 3 Ib. i. 300. 4 Ib. i. 186.
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