hardly be held responsible; because he avowedly relied upon his predecessors for etymological learning; and upon Junius and Skinner in particular, for the northern or Teutonick etymologies, which Tooke has so mercilessly attacked. The truth is, that for a considerable length of time, English lexicography had been in an extremely low state; and this first onset of Tooke, being supported by an array of learning drawn from the northern languages of Europe, which had not become an object of study with many English scholars, produced a shock which was then severely felt, and from which the followers of Johnson have not yet entirely recovered. Even Johnson himself, we are told, was so completely overpowered by that tempest of Gothic learning, that he said, if he were to make a new edition of his dictionary, he should (as Tooke states it in unqualified terms,) adopt his derivations." If he had indeed adopted them without exception, he would unquestionably have adopted many false and imperfectly developed etymologies. But it is probable that Boswell's statement of Johnson's remark upon this subject is the most correct-that Johnson said he should adopt "several" of them.

The partisans of Tooke, accordingly, both in England and in our own country, sung the song of triumph. Dr. Darwin, a man of genius, but nevertheless of an ardent temperament, and assuredly a much more competent judge of questions in botany or physic, which he had studied, than of the science of philology, which he had not-Dr. Darwin, we say, in that curious work called Zoönomia, proclaimed to the world, that Horne Tooke had "unfolded by a single flash of light the whole theory of language, which had so long been buried beneath the learned lumber of the Schools." The influence of opinions like these would be naturally felt in our country, where philological learning was quite as low, to say the least, as it was in England. Tooke was accordingly hailed as an oracle, and Johnson was decried as a numskull. Our learned countryman, Mr. Webster, who has experienced the fate of a "prophet in his own country," and has not yet been able, even as far as his real learning gave him a right, to guide the opinions of a free country-he, we say, in his earlier life, caught the flame kindled by the "Diversions of Purley," and promulgated with the usual ardour of youth, the opinions of Tooke, without that discrimination among them, which his own subsequent researches have obliged him to make. This fervour, however, is now much abated; the very questions to which Tooke's publication gave rise, obliged the scholars of England to commence the long-neglected study of their own language, and its kindred dialects of the North; and among them, as well as among the scholars of the continent of Europe, the subject of general philology began to excite attention.

It was, of course, very soon discovered, that in tracing the

English language, it was not enough to stop our inquiries where Horne Tooke did, at the Northern languages; but it was found necessary to pursue even those languages and our own to the East, the grand "cunabula gentium." It was soon perceived that Tooke's knowledge of the Northern languages was not profound; and that, as to the Oriental, he was quite ignorant; and thus, acute and able as he was by nature, he proved to be essentially deficient in a fundamental qualification of an etymologist. Accordingly, one of the main principles of Tooke's work is exactly the reverse of what it ought to be. He asserts, that "a great part of the Latin is the language of our northern ancestors, grafted upon the Greek and to our northern language the etymologist must go, for that part of the Latin, which the Greek will not furnish ;'*-which, to readers who have studied the history of languages, is doing in sober earnest just what Swift proposed jocosely, that is, to derive Greek and Latin from the English! Now we have the best evidence possible in such a case, that what Tooke hastily pronounced to be northern primitives, grafted on the Latin, were nothing but Latin words, pillaged and mutilated by the barbarians of the North, who laid waste the cultivated languages, as they had done the fair fields of Latinum. This single fact sweeps away a vast portion of the curious and amusing, but unsubstantial fabric of the Philosopher of Purley. The primitive language of the North, however strange it may seem to persons who have not studied the emigrations of our roving race, was Oriental. It will doubtless appear extraor dinary to such persons, that incontestable affinities, and to a great extent, are now ascertained between the Russian and other languages of the North, and the Sanscrit in the East, (we say nothing here of the Greek, which also has Sanscrit affinities,) and that the German language is derived from the Oriental stock, through the Persian, which it resembles, not merely in a considerable number of radical words and sounds, but also in its syllables of formation, and its grammatical forms. In like manner, the radical words of the English are, even with our present knowledge, to be clearly traced through the northern families, to the Latin, Greek, and Oriental languages; and the monosyllabic character of our old Saxon words, as we call them, may possibly lead future inquirers even to the Chinese, the source of that vast family of monosyllabic languages, which are spoken by so large a proportion of our race on the Eastern Continent.

Great, therefore, as the fame of Tooke was, for a time, and justly as he deserved praise for his sagacity in following out his theory of the particles, as it was called, (and of which he might have been a discoverer, though the same theory had been ap

* Diversions of Purley, vol. 2, p. 110, Philadelphia edition.

plied before to other languages on the continent of Europe, and was not unknown to the ancients,) yet his fame as an etymologist now shines with diminished lustre, and may, in the revolu tions of opinion, be doomed, like that of many others, to suffer actual injustice. Our learned countryman abovenamed, who was once inclined to yield as ready obedience to his master Tooke as he would to any man, has in his late publications felt himself obliged to qualify the praise which he once thought to be no more than his due.

We have extended these remarks from other motives than the pleasure of fault-finding; we have no unreasonable prejudices against Tooke and his followers; nor are we conscious of being swayed by any unfounded partialities for Johnson and his school. We think we can respond the old sentiment

Tros Rutulusve fuat, nullo discrimine habebo.

But we deem it right, and necessary, in this restless and inquisitive age, to hold up to view examples of this kind, for the benefit of the younger and inexperienced portion of readers, and to interpose a caution, that they should not suddenly yield their assent to any opinions, merely because they have the merit of being in conflict with those results of long experience, which are often, with equal audacity and injustice, stigmatized as prejudices.

When Johnson first published his Dictionary, (now more than seventy years ago,) English lexicography was in a deplorably low state. He says in his justly celebrated preface-"I have attempted a dictionary of the English language, which, while it was employed in the cultivation of every species of literature, has itself been hitherto neglected, suffered to spread under the direction of chance, into wild exuberance, resigned to the tyranny of time and fashion, and exposed to the corruptions of ignorance, and caprices of innovation." The principal work of the kind at that period, was Bailey's popular Dictionary, originally published in folio, and afterwards abridged and republished many times in octavo; a work of considerable merit in an age when books of this kind were recommended in their title-pages, like the "New World of Words," by Milton's nephew, Phillips, as containing explanations of "hard words." As it was, however, Bailey's was the best work which Johnson could take for his guide, in general, and in some sort for the basis of his own Dictionary. Bailey was an instructer of youth, and probably ranked above the common tribe of pedagogues of his time; for we observe at the end of his preface, he advertises-"N. B. Youth boarded, and taught the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew Languages; writing, accounts, and other parts of school-learning, in a method more easy and expeditious than common; by the

author, at his house in Stepney, near the Church." He was, no doubt, a man of considerable philological knowledge, as philology was then studied; but he too often followed the conceits and vagaries of his old-fashioned predecessors, and the whims of his own times; and he thus heaped together an undigested mass of erudition, which, whatever information and amusement it might have afforded to his contemporaries, can impart but little of either to the present age.

The other leading nations of Europe, particularly the French, were far in advance of the English in the study and cultivation of their language, at the time when Johnson undertook his Dictionary. Swift, in his letter to the Earl of Oxford, above an hundred years ago, speaks of our language as less refined than those of Italy, Spain, or France, &c.; and he adds, (what now excites a smile,) that "the French, for these last fifty years, has been polishing as much as it will bear." The French Academy's Dictionary, (now dedicated with a little too much of what our English mode of thinking would characterize as national vanity-"A l'Immortalité" (!) had already given a considerable degree of fixedness to that charming language of social intercourse, which left but little to be done for a long time. This celebrated work, however, had two essential defects, as they would certainly be considered at this day-the total want of etymologies and authorities; which Johnson supplied, as far as he was able, in his own work. As to the latter of these deficiencies, it is true, that the forty French Academicians, (whom Piron with a cutting sarcasm, acknowledged to have de l'esprit comme quatre,) were themselves to be the authority; and so far the omissions of the names of authors in their Dictionary was justifiable. But, as to the absence of all etymologies, it is to be accounted for, only by the shameful want of philological learning in France at that period. Yet the Academy's Dictionary, considered as a whole, as a systematic performance, (upon a system, indeed, which was vicious,) is, to this day, among the most 'correct and claborate works of the kind in any of the European languages. The French themselves boldly assert, "that neither in any other nation, nor in any other age, has there been a similar dictionary of the European languages." But we should differ so far from them on this point, that we should rather adopt the opinion of a liberal English Reviewer, who observes-the Grammatisch Kritischen Wörterbuch, or German Dictionary of Adelung, "comes nearer to the idea of a perfect dictionary, than any other effort of individual diligence and modern culture." The reviewer then gives the learned German all due credit for his "acute theory of the origin of speech, which guides the erudition of his etymological researches to the sensible idea latent in the parent-word of the most abstract and me

taphorical ramifications of thought;" and for his "historical familiarity with the migrations and shifting civilization of the tribes, whose confluent jargons have supplied the reservoirs of the German tongue," as well as for his "comprehensive knowledge of the nature of polished style, and of the first literature of his country." This great work is, indeed, deserving of as high praise as the reviewer here gives it; and we should feel no hesitation in adding, that no man can study the Northern languages to advantage, unless he is familiar with Adelung's Dictionary. The principal, perhaps the only deficiency in it is, the want of that full information upon Persian and other Oriental affinities, which has been the fruit of discoveries made since the work was planned and published, and which would have enabled the learned author to develope more advantageously and correctly, the analogies and history of the Northern dialects. We may also add, that the German scholars have drawn the same comparison between the labours of united Academicians, and the single unaided effort of Adelung, which the English have done in the case of Johnson; observing, that Adelung had done alone for the German, what it required whole Academies to accomplish for other languages. t

The authority of the French Academy's Dictionary, has, however, been very great; for, though some of its decisions were jeered at by the wits, and others were appealed from by the learned, yet it has maintained a commanding influence for a very long period, in a nation comprising a vast body of men of learning and taste, who would not tolerate any work of the kind which was not worthy of confidence.

The Academy certainly possessed advantages, as a body, which no individual among them could command. And, though we are aware of the common observation, that a work of this kind, like any other, ought to be conceived and executed by one mind alone, yet, there is much weight in the reasoning of the Academicians, by way of reply to this remark. They say, in substance, that there is no word in any language, which is not taken in several different senses; that by one analogy and another, a word passes through one signification to another; that in the arts which most nearly resemble each other, each word receives different meanings; in the mouth of the orator, the historian, and the poet, there are evident though delicate shades of meaning of

* Monthly Review, vol. 24, p. 559: New Series.

See the article Adelung, in the "Conversations Lexikon" a standard German work, which we rejoice to find is now translating, with additions, in our own country, under the editorship of Dr. Francis Lieber, from Berlin, and Edward Wigglesworth, Esq. of Boston. This noble project will reflect great honour upon the literary character of the metropolis of New-England, and upon the enterprise and spirit of the booksellers of our own city, who have undertaken to publish it.