Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/66

478 Scholars was published by Harris as editor-in-chief, and F. Sturges Allen, who had been on the staflE of the original International, as gen- eral editor. Joseph Emerson Worcester (i 784-1 865), a graduate of Yale in 181 1 and Hawthorne's schoolmaster at Salem in 1813, after- ward removed to Cambridge, where he came to be numbered among the eccentric characters of the place, and produced school books and books of reference in history and geography. His series of dictionaries (1828, 1830, 1846, 1855) brought on the "War of the Dictionaries" with Webster and his adherents. Apart from irrelevant personalities, the controversy is reduc- ible to one between a retiring and conservative scholar, willing to record the actualities of usage, and a brisk business man and linguistic reformer. Worcester's large Dictionary of the English Language (i860) for a few years rivalled the Pictorial Web- ster of 1859, especially in England and in New England; but after the Unabridged of 1864 it lost popularity and authority. For the beginnings of Old English philology in America we must look once more to Thomas Jefferson. As has been noted, Jefferson favoured the study of the Germanic languages in general, and gave them a place in the proposed curriculum of William and Mary College and of the University of Virginia. Though he made no independent research into any of these languages, he had diligently studied and annotated several Anglo-Saxon grammars; he read Old English "with his feet on the fender" ; and in the course of his works he expressed many ideas on English philology, some erroneous but all interesting. He favoured neologisms as a sign of a language's vitality ; he urged the systematic study of dialects because these often preserved racy and primitive forms which the literary language had lost; he felt that Anglo-Saxon was merely "old English"; he deprecated the treatment of Germanic grammar, old or new, as if it were Latin grammar; and he definitely recognized the connection of "the ancient languages and literature of the North . . . with our own language, laws, customs, and history." To teach Germanic philology Jefferson appointed George Blaetterman, a German then resident in London, to the first professorship of Modern Languages in the University of Vir- ginia, a post which he held from 1825 to 1840. He is said to