Would we learn the true history of a modern language, we must not apply to the CRITICS, who only press for conformity and appeal to precedents; but we must look to those other more practical dealers in words, the LEXICOGRAPHERS, who at once reveal to us all the incomings and outgoings of their great "exchequer of words." Turn over the prefaces of our elder lexicographers. Every one of them pretends to prune away the vocabulary of his predecessors, and to supply, in this mortality of words, those which live on the lips of contemporaries. In the great tome of his record of archaisms and neologisms, the grey moss hangs about the oak, and the graft shoots forth with fresh verdure. BARET, one of our earliest lexicographers, in the reign of Elizabeth thus expresses himself:--"I thought it not meete to stuffe this worke with old obsolete words which now a daies no good writer will use."[8] Words spurned at by the lexicographer of 1580 had been consecrated by the venerable fathers of our literature and of the Reformation, not a century past; yet another century does not elapse when another dictionary throws all into confusion. HENRY COCKRAM, whose volume has been at least twelve times reprinted, boldly avows that "what any before me in this kind have begun, I have not only fully finished, but thoroughly perfected;" and, presuming on the privilege of "an interpreter of hard English words," the language is wrecked in a stormy pedantry of Latin and Greek terms, which however indicate that new corruption of our style which some writers and speakers, as Hamon L'Estrange, were attempting.[9] What a picture have we sketched of the mortality of words, through all the fleeting stages of their decadency from TREVISA to CAXTON, from CAXTON to BARET, from BARET to COCKRAM, and from COCKRAM to his numerous successors! Thus then has our language been in perpetual movement, and that "purity of style," whose presumed violation has raised such reiterated querulousness, has in reality proved to be but a mocking phantom, fugitive or unsubstantial. Our English has often changed her dress, to attract by new graces, and has spoken with more languages than one. She has even submitted to Fashion, that most encroaching usurper of words, who sends them no one knows how and no one knows why, banishing the old and establishing the new; and who has ever found her legitimacy unquestioned when in her matured age we recognise Fashion under the consecrated name of CUSTOM.