Page:Evolution of English Lexicography.djvu/24

 Rh dictionaries, and traces of it may still be discovered in the Latin-English dictionaries of to-day.

Of printed English-Latin works, after the Promptorium, one of the earliest was the Vulgaria of William Horman, Headmaster and Provost of Eton, printed by Pynson in 1519. This is a Dictionarium or liber dictionarius in the older sense, for it consists of short dictiones or sayings, maxims, and remarks, arranged under subject-headings, such as De Pietate, De Impietate, De corporis dotibus, De Valetudinis cura, De Hortensibus, De Bellicis, and finally a heading Promiscua. It may therefore be conceived that it is not easy to find any particular dictio. Horman was originally a Cambridge man; but, according to Wood, he was elected a Fellow of New College, Oxford, in 1477, the very year in which Caxton printed his first book in England, and in this connexion it is interesting to find among the illustrative sentences in the Vulgaria, this reference to the new art (sign. Oij): 'The prynters haue founde a crafte to make bokes by brasen letters sette in ordre by a frame,' which is thus latinized: 'Chalcographi artem excogitauerunt imprimendi libros qua literæ formis æreis excudunt.' Of later English-Latin dictionaries two deserve passing mention: the Abecedarium of Richard Huloet or Howlet, a native of Wisbech, which appeared in the reign of Edward VI, in 1552, and the Alvearie of John Baret, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, published under Elizabeth in 1573. The Abecedarium, although it gives the Latin equivalents, may be looked upon to some extent as an English dictionary, for many of the words have