But the Academicians were not slow to perceive, that a Dictionary so large could exercise little popular influence. They began, therefore, soon afterwards, to prepare an abridgment, in a single folio volume, for more general use, and published the first edition of it in 1780. The project was judicious, and its execution skilful. It omitted the discussions, citations, and formal etymologies of the larger work; but it established a better vocabulary, and improved many of the old definitions. It had, therefore, from its first appearance, a decided authority; and, by the persevering labors of the Academy, has continued, in its successive editions, to be the proper standard of the language,--labors which, since the latter part of the eighteenth century, have been always heavy, and sometimes disagreeable, from the constant tendency of even the better writers, like Melendez and his school, to fall into Gallicisms, which the increasing intercourse with France had rendered fashionable in the society of their time. Another difficulty, however, soon presented itself to the Academy, quite as serious as the size of their Dictionary. It was that of the orthography they had adopted. The spelling of the Castilian--partly, perhaps, from the very various elements of which it was composed, and partly from the popular character of its literature--had always been more unsettled than that of the other modern languages. Lebrixa, the great scholar of the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, first attempted to reduce it to order, and the simplicity of his system, which appeared in 1517, seemed at first likely to secure general favor and acceptance. But thirty treatises, that at different times followed, had--with the exception of the acute and pleasant one printed by Aleman when he was in Mexico, in 1609--served rather to unsettle and confuse the whole matter, than to determine any thing in relation to it.[282] [282] The “Ortografía de la Lengua Castellana,” (Mexico, 1609, 4to, ff. 83) is a pleasant and important treatise, which, as the novelist intimates, he began to write in Castile and finished in Mexico. It proposes to reverse the letter ↄ in order to express the soft _ch_ as in _mucho_, to be printed _muↄo_; uses two forms of the letter _r_; writes the conjunction _y_ always _i_, as Salvá now insists it should be; and claims _j_, _ll_, and _ñ_ to be separate letters, as they have long been admitted to be.