noblest quarry of the sportsman! To follow their spoor through the jungles and champaigns of the English language; to flush them from their hiding places in dense thickets of Chaucer or Spenser, track them through the noble aisles of Shakespeare forest and find them at last perching gayly on the branches of O. Henry or George Ade! The New Oxford Dictionary, that most splendid monument of human scholarship, gives moving pictures of words from their first hatching down to the time when they soar like eagles in the open air of today.
We know no greater joy than an afternoon spent with dear old Dr. Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, published after seven years' patient labor in 1755. Probably somewhere in Philadelphia there is a copy of the first edition; but the one we know (at the Mercantile Library) is the revised fourth edition which the doctor put out in 1775. One can hardly read without a lump in the throat that noble preface in which Doctor Johnson rehearses the greatness and discouragement of his task. And who can read too often his rebuff to the Earl of Chesterfield, who, having studiously neglected to aid the lexicographer during the long years of his compilation, sought by belated flattery to associate himself with the vast achievement? "Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?"
