Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/64

 476 Scholars acquainted with it, had acquired a true and sensible feeling for historical method and for the weight of analogy in deciding points where usage is doubtful. In these respects his Diction- ary anticipates the methods of the larger American Dictionary of the English Language of 1828, in the preparation of which he spent the next twenty years. Meanwhile there should be noted the appearance of a dic- tionary by Burgiss Allison: The American Standard of Ortho- graphy and Pronunciation, and Modern Dictionary of the English Language (1815). This is an abridged form of material which Allison promised to issue soon without abridgment ; but whether he did so is not certain. What distinguishes his work is that he aimed not merely at utility, as Webster did, but at "fixing a standard," and that he had enlisted the interest of "many distinguished Characters, and Seminaries. . . . The recep- tion of their collective observations, and through them of the literati in general, must eventually furnish a highly perfected dictionary." Webster's studies were without any such guidance. He applied himself to etymology; undertook a comparative study of the ' ' principal words in twenty languages, arranged in classes under their primary elements or letters"; and of these made a Synopsis which gave him "what appeared to be the general principle on which these languages were constructed." There- upon he spent a year abroad, studying chiefly ' ' the prontmcia- tion of the language in England . . . and incidental points in pronunciation and grammatical construction." The book, finished at Cambridge early in 1825, was issued in 1828. Web- ster lived to make one revision (for the edition of 1840), and was engaged upon another when he died. It was unfortunate that Webster did not come into contact with the "literati," for they would have enabled him before his second edition, and all the more before his third, to correct his work by means of the comparative method which had been elaborated in Germany. Yet even had the complete method of Grimm and Bopp been accessible to him in 1828, Webster, then seventy years old, could hardly have been censured for not acquiring at that age a new set of highly inflected languages with complex inter-relations, or even for not realizing that the new method would kill his old etymologies. But the fact seems to be that he was simply un-