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20
The Romanes Lecture 1900

iiii partes of the worlde, Byrdes, Bees, Flies, and other, the Water, the Sea, Fishes, a Shippe with other water vessels, the earth, Mettales, Serpents, woorms and creepinge beastes, Foure-footed beastes, &c.[1]

It is unnecessary in this lecture to recount even the names of the Latin-English and English-Latin dictionaries of the sixteenth century. It need only be mentioned that there were six successive and successively enlarged editions of Sir Thomas Elyot; that the last three of these were edited by Thomas Cooper, 'Schole-Maister of Maudlens in Oxford' (the son of an Oxford tradesman, and educated as a chorister in Magdalen College School, who rose to be Dean of Christ Church and Vice-Chancellor of the University, and to hold successively the episcopal sees of Lincoln and Winchester), and that Cooper, in 1565, published his great Thesaurus Linguæ Romanæ et Britannicæ, 'opera et industria Thomse Cooperi Magdalenensis,' founded upon the great French work of Robert Stephens (Estienne), the learned French scholar and printer. Of this work Martin Marprelate says in his Epistle (Arber, p. 42), 'His Lordship of Winchester is a great Clarke, for he hath translated his Dictionarie, called Cooper's Dictionarie, verbatim out of Robert Stephanus his Thesaurus, and ill-favoured too, they say!' This was, however, the criticism of an adversary; Cooper had added to Stephens's work many accessions from his editions of Sir Thomas Elyot, and other sources; his Thesaurus was the basis of later Latin-

  1. At the end is an alphabetical list of adjectives; extending from lf. 79a, col. 2, to 83a, foot.