The Dictionary

Abstract

Hitherto, he had tried his genius as a translator, a satirist and a biographer; he was now to appear a philologist. The plan of his Dictionary, which he displays with so much elegance and dignity in an address to the late Earl of Chesterfield, was published as early as the year 1748.¹ This performance promised something so much like what all men of taste had long thought wanting to the purity, stability and perfection of our language, exhibited an object of such magnitude to the public mind, and was itselfso exquisite a specimen of the happiest arrangement and most polished diction, that it brought Johnson forward to general attention with peculiar advantage. The eyes of all the world were turned on what part the nobleman thus distinguished would now act in concert with the first writer, and interested by the sketch of a work the most laborious and useful of any which even then had roused the curiosity and excited the wonder of an enlightened age. From a secretary of state, still more illustrious for his elegant accomplishments than for his high birth or official situation, something like substantial encouragement was expected to an undertaking which aimed at no less than a standard Dictionary of the English tongue. His lordship was a competent judge of the subject. He acknowledged its importance and necessity.

Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Late Dr Samuel Johnson, pp. 25–6.