Page:Evolution of English Lexicography.djvu/33

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30
The Romanes Lecture 1900

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 à 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.

I suppose it is a truism, that the higher position now taken by English studies, is intimately interwoven with the advances which have been made during the last quarter of a century in the higher education of women, and that but for the movement to let women share in the advantages of a university education, it is doubtful whether the nineteenth century would have witnessed the establishment of a School of English Language and Literature at Oxford. In con-