faults as may be called inadvertencies.[1] On the same principles I have ventured to criticise Dr. Johnson,[2] whose friendship and advice I was honoured with, whose memory I love, and whose intellectual powers impress me with something like religious veneration and awe. I do not pretend to be exempt from faults myself; in a work like the present, it would be a miracle to escape them; nor have I the least idea of deciding as judge, in a case of so much delicacy and importance as the pronunciation of a whole people; I have only assumed the part of an advocate to plead the cause of consistency and analogy, and, where custom is either silent or dubious, to tempt the lovers of their language to incline to the side of propriety: so that my design is principally to give a kind of history of pronunciation, and a register of its present state; and, where the authorities of Dictionaries or Speakers are found to differ, to give such a display of the analogies of the language as may enable every inspector to decide for himself.
With respect to the explanation of words, except in very few instances, I have scrupulously followed Dr. Johnson. His Dictionary has been deemed lawful plunder by every subsequent lexicographer; and so servilely has it been copied, that such words as he must have omitted merely by mistake, as Predilection, Respectable, Descriptive, Sulky, Inimical, Interference, and many others, are neither in Mr. Sheridan's, Dr. Kenrick's, nor several other Dictionaries.
- ↑ The inspector will be pleased to take notice, that my observations on Mr. Sheridan's Dictionary relate to the first edition, published in his life-time, and the second, sometime after his death: whatever alterations may have been made by his subsequent editors, I am totally unacquainted with.
- ↑ See Sceptic, Scirrhus, Codle, Further, etc.
