It is instructive to compare the preface with the celebrated one by Dr. Johnson, introducing his dictionary. Webster, filled with a parochial enthusiasm for his native country, exaggerates the necessity for a local dictionary, and anticipates the vast audience that will one day require his work. To him language is the instrument not so much of literature as of daily association. He thinks of a dictionary as a book of reference for the plain reader, and a guide to him in the correct use of his vernacular. Johnson, proud of his literary heritage, burdened with a sense of his own inadequacy, at once confesses the dignity of his work and the melancholy of his own nature. He acknowledges the limitation of his own philological attainments, and rests his claims to honor upon the fullness with which he has gathered and arranged the materials scattered through the vast area of English literature. The one sees the subject from the side of nationality, the other from that of literature. Webster is thinking of his own people, Johnson of the un-national tribe of scholars and men of letters. The historical associations justify each, for Johnson was distinctly the member of a great class which was beginning to assert its independence of social authority. With all his loyalty to his king, he was at heart a republican in literature, and stoutly denied the divine right of patrons. His dictionary was the sign of literary emancipation; it was the witness to an intellectual freedom which might be in alliance with government, but could not be its tool. The history of English literature since that date is a democratic history. Webster, on his part, was the prophet of a national independence, in which language and literature were involved as inseparable elements. To him books were neither the production nor the possession of a class, but necessarily incident to the life of a free people. Hence, in his citation of American authorities, he is undaunted by the paucity of purely literary men; law reports and state documents answer his purpose as well. He saw literature as the accompaniment of self-government, and the dictionary in his eyes was a vast school-book, not a thesaurus of literature. I can hardly expect my readers to follow me patiently through a close examination of the successive editions of Webster's large dictionary, and I have no such high opinion of my own patience as to suppose that I should continue on the road after my readers had dropped behind; but it is possible to make a rough comparison of the first edition of 1828 and the latest of 1880, in order to see what Webster did which needed to be undone, and to form some estimate of the substantial service which he rendered lexicography in that edition which was more nearly his sole and unaided work.