Of these extracts, I suppose opinion is uniform. Every man who reads them, reads them with contempt. To tell us that a _man_ is not a _beast_, seems to be an insult, rather than a definition. To say, that _young_ is _not old_, and, that _old_ is _not young, of old_, &c. is to say nothing at all. There is a medium; there is a state between these periods of life. And his definitions convey no meaning; for a man may be _not old_ tho' he is _not young_. Many articles, such as whoring, whoremaster, whoremonger, whorishly, &c. are as indecent, as they are impertinent, and seem only designed to divert school boys. Hum, Yuck, Fiddle, Fiddler, Fiddlefaddle, _s._ Fiddlefaddle, _a._ Fiddlestick, Fiddlestring, Thimble, Needle, Gunpowder, Hope, O, and O--and Oh, and twenty-eight or thirty explanations of the particle _on_, are left without remark to the reader's penetration. Some are well enough acquainted with a _maidenhead_, and such as are not, will be no wiser by reading Dr Johnson: For he says, That it is _virginity_, and that again is explained (like more than half the words in his book) by the word it explains. Neither can a _maidenhead_ ensure freedom from _pollution_; for a girl may be polluted, without losing her _maidenhead_; and on the other hand, the Doctor dare not say that a _married_ woman is, for that reason, _polluted_. Love, he calls _lewdness_, and he may as well say, that _light_ is _darkness_. His admirers will answer, that he also gives the right meaning; but let them tell, why he gave any besides the right meaning, and why he collected such a load of blunders into his book. Or since he did collect them, why he did not mark them down as wrong. For in the preface to his octavo, he tells us, that it is written for 'explaining terms of science.' But to select twenty barbarous misapplications of a word, is not explaining the word, but only _confusion worse confounded_. Indeed that whole preface is a piece of the most profound nonsense, which ever insulted the common sense of the world. A virgin, is _a woman not a mother_. But many wives, and many concubines too, have never propagated the species, though they had (as Othello says) a thousand times committed the act of shame. From this literary chaos, a foreigner would be apt to imagine that _they_ were _virgins_.