ress, must often speak of
what he does not understand; that a writer will sometimes be hurried
by eagerness to the end, and sometimes faint with weariness under a
task which Scaliger compares to the labors of the anvil and the mine;
that what is obvious is not always known, and what is known is not
always present; that sudden fits of inadvertency will surprize
vigilance, slight avocations will seduce attention, and casual
eclipses of the mind will darken learning; and that the writer shall
often in vain trace his memory at the moment of need for that which
yesterday he knew with intuitive readiness, and which will come
uncalled into his thoughts tomorrow.

In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it not
be forgotten that much likewise is performed; and tho no book was ever
spared out of tenderness to the author, and the world is little
solicitous to know whence proceeded the faults of that which it
condemns, yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it, that the English
Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned, and
without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of
retirement, or under the shelter of academic bowers, but amid
inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow. It may
repress the triumph of malignant criticism to observe, that if our
language is not here fully displayed, I have only failed in an attempt
which no human powers have hitherto completed. If the lexicons of
ancient tongues, now immutably fixt, and comprized in a few volumes,
be yet, after the toil of successive ages, inadequate and delusive; if
the aggregated knowledge and cooperating diligence of the Italian
academicians did not secure them from the censure of Beni;[23] if the
embodied critics of France, when fifty years had been spent upon their
work, were obliged to change its economy, and give their second
edition another form, I may surely be contented without the praise of
perfection, which if I could obtain in this gloom of solitude, what
would it avail me? I have protracted my work till most of those whom I
wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage
are empty sounds. I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity,
having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.

II

POPE AND DRYDEN COMPARED[24]

Pope profest to have learned his poetry from Dryden, whom, whenever an
opportunity was presented, he praised through his whole lif