ther-tongue? To the
scholars of the Renascence the notion would have seemed absurd--as
absurd as it has seemed to some of their descendants in the nineteenth
century, that an English grammar-school or an English university
should trouble itself about such aboriginal products of the English
skull, as English language and literature. But by the end of the
sixteenth century, as by the end of the nineteenth, there was a moving
of the waters: the Renascence of ancient learning had itself brought
into English use thousands of learned words, from Latin, Greek,
Hebrew, Arabic, and other languages, 'ink-horn terms,' as they were
called by Bale and by Puttenham, unknown to, and not to be imbibed
from, mother or grandmother. A work exhibiting the spelling, and
explaining the meaning, of these new-fangle 'hard words' was the felt
want of the day; and the first attempt to supply it marks, on the
whole, the most important point in the evolution of the modern English
Dictionary.

In 1604, Robert Cawdrey, who had been a schoolmaster at Okeham, and
afterwards at Coventry, published a modest octavo of 120 pages, 5-1/2
inches by 3-1/2, calling itself _The Table Alphabeticall of Hard
Words_, in which he set forth the proper spelling and meaning of some
3,000 of these learned terms; his work reached a third edition in
1612[8]. In 1616, Dr. John Bullokar, then resident in Chichester,
followed with a work of the same kind and size, named by him _An
English Expositor_, of which numerous editions came out, one as late
as 1684. And in 1623 appeared the work which first assumed the title
of 'The English Dictionarie,' by H.C., Gent. H.C., we learn from the
dedication, was Henry Cockeram, to whom John Ford the dramatist
addressed the following congratulatory lines:--

To my industrious friend, the Author of this English Dictionarie,
MR. HENRY COCKRAM OF EXETER.

Borne in the West? liue there? so far from Court?
From Oxford, Cambridge, London? yet report
(Now in these daies of Eloquence) such change
Of words? vnknown? vntaught? tis new and strange.
Let Gallants therefore skip no more from hence
To Italic, France, Spaine, and with expence
Waste time and faire estates, to learne new fashions
Of complementall phrases, soft temptations
To glorious beggary: Here let them hand
This Booke; here studie, reade, and vnderstand:
Then shall they find varietie at Home,
As curious as at Paris, or at Rome.
For m