218
Authors quoted in The Dictionary
[A.D. 1748.
various significations[1]. The authorities were copied from the books themselves, in which he had marked the passages with a black-lead pencil, the traces of which could easily be effaced[2]. I have seen several of them, in which that trouble had not been taken; so that they were just as when used by the copyists[3]. It is remarkable, that he was so attentive in the choice of the passages in which words were authorised, that one may read page after page of his Dictionary with improvement and pleasure; and it should not pass unobserved, that he has quoted no authour whose writings had a tendency to hurt sound religion and morality[4].
- ↑ Boswell's account of the manner in which Johnson compiled his Dictionary is confused and erroneous. He began his task (as he himself expressly described to me), by devoting his first care to a diligent perusal of all such English writers as were most correct in their language, and under every sentence which he meant to quote he drew a line, and noted in the margin the first letter of the word under which it was to occur. He then delivered these books to his clerks, who transcribed each sentence on a separate slip of paper, and arranged the same under the word referred to. By these means he collected the several words and their different significations; and when the whole arrangement was alphabetically formed, he gave the definitions of their meanings, and collected their etymologies from Skinner, Junius, and other writers on the subject. Percy.
- ↑ 'The books he used for this purpose were what he had in his own collection, a copious but a miserably ragged one, and all such as he could borrow; which latter, if ever they came back to those that lent them, were so defaced as to be scarce worth owning, and yet some of his friends were glad to receive and entertain them as curiosities.' Hawkins, p. 175.
- ↑ In the copy that he thus marked of Sir Matthew Hale's Primitive Origination of Mankind, opposite the passage where it is stated, that 'Averroes says that if the world were not eternal . . . it could never have been at all, because an eternal duration must necessarily have anteceded the first production of the world,' he has written:—'This argument will hold good equally against the writing that I now write.'
- ↑ Boswell must mean 'whose writings taken as a whole had a tendency,' &c, Johnson quotes Dryden, and of Dryden he says:—'Of
The
