e gradually been sinking into
desuetude for a century; the few which remain I have expunged."

Dr. Johnson was the Magnus Apollo of lexicographers then, and his bulky
fame still casts a large shadow over the world of words. To rebel
against his autocratic rule at the beginning of this century was to
write one's self down an audacious and presuming sciolist. It is not
surprising, therefore, that Webster's criticism of Johnson in this
Dictionary and in other places should have exposed him to censure. Dr.
Ramsay of Charleston, a man of consequence in his day, wrote him that
the "prejudices against any American attempts to improve Dr. Johnson
were very strong in that city." The letter gave Webster his opportunity,
and he at once wrote and published his vigorous pamphlet respecting the
"Errors in Johnson's Dictionary and other Lexicons," which is addressed
to Dr. Ramsay. He takes a very lofty view of the situation. "The
intelligence," he writes, of this resentment in Charleston, "is not
wholly unexpected, for similar prejudices have been manifested in some
parts of the Northern States. A man who has read with slight attention
the history of nations, in their advances from barbarism to civilization
and science, cannot be surprised at the strength of prejudices long
established and never disturbed. Few centuries have elapsed since many
men lost their lives or their liberty by publishing NEW TRUTHS; and not
two centuries have past since Galileo was imprisoned by an
ecclesiastical court, for defending the truth of the Copernican System,
condemned to do penance for three years, and his book burnt at Rome, as
containing dangerous and damnable heresies. This example is cited as one
of a multitude which the history of man presents to our view; and if it
differs in _degree_, it accords in _principle_, with the case now before
the American public."

He then, after admitting the value of Johnson's ethical writings, but
distrusting his philological attainments, makes good his objections by
detailed specifications. He condemns the insertion of a multitude of
words which do not belong to the language, mentioning such unnaturalized
foreigners as _adversable_, _advesperate_, _adjugate_, _agriculation_,
_abstrude_, _injudicable_, _spicosity_, _crapulence_, _morigerous_,
_tenebrosity_, _balbucinate_, _illachrymable_, etc., words to which the
reader may, if he knows Latin, attach some sort of meaning, but which he
would be slow to introduce i