Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/63

Hall ; Noah Webster 475 Coleridge, and De Quincy, fulminates chiefly against Richard Grant White, and his Modern English (1873) returns to the attack, once more leading up to White through Cicero, Sir John Cheke, Bentley, Swift, Dr. Johnson, and others who have laboured under the delusion that usage needs to be fixed in order to save a language from corruption. Wherever Hall attacks White he routs him. Yet the actual influence of White has probably been greater, and this not without reason. Hall often adopts a tone of personal vituperation which antagonizes while it amuses. His own crabbed sentences go far to exasperate even a reader who must needs respect his scholarship. White, though he tried to schoolmaster the language, did generally prefer the things which are of good report; and his precepts, apart from certain easily exploded pedantries, made in general against affectation and for simplicity. The solid masses of Hall's erudition have needed to be diluted for popular consump- tion, and it is this dilution that Professor Lounsbury performed in some of his less weighty works, for example. The Standard of Usage in English. The Harvard achievement in rhetoric is matched by the Yale achievement in lexicography. Webster and Worcester were Yale men; Whitney is closely associated with Yale; and the first American dictionary, that of Samuel Johnson, Jr. ( 1 757-1 836), son of the Samuel Johnson who was the first president of King's College, was published (1798) in New Haven. Noah Webster (1758-1843), a Connecticut farmer's ooy, graduated at Yale in 1778, and after studying law and teaching school in several Connecticut towns, compiled in the years following 1782 his Grammatical Institute of the English Language, in three parts: (l) his celebrated Spelling Book (1783), of which "more than eighty million copies are said to have been sold before 1880 " ; (il) a Plain and Comprehensive Grammar (1784) ; (ill) a Reader (1785). His first dictionary, the Compendious Dictionary of 1806, at once takes independent Yankee ground. Webster was not to be imposed upon by even the authority of the English Johnson ; the locution "never so wise," opposed by Johnson, he favoured on historical grounds ; ' ' skeptic, ' ' proposed by Johnson, he opposed on grounds of analogy. In fact, Webster had taught himself some Anglo-Saxon, and, however imperfectly