Webster's inconsistency gave his opponents a formidable weapon for use against him--until it began to be noticed that the orthodox English spelling was quite as inconsistent. He sought to change /acre/ to /aker/, but left /lucre/ unchanged. He removed the final /f/ from /bailiff/, /mastiff/, /plaintiff/ and /pontiff/, but left it in /distaff/. He changed /c/ to /s/ in words of the /offense/ class, but left the /c/ in /fence/. He changed the /ck/ in /frolick/, /physick/, etc., into a simple /c/, but restored it in such derivatives as /frolicksome/. He deleted the silent /u/ in /mould/, but left it in /court/. These slips were made the most of by Cobb in a pamphlet printed in 1831.[11] He also detected Webster in the frequent /faux pas/ of using spellings in his definitions and explanations that conflicted with the spellings he advocated. Various other purists joined in the attack, and it was renewed with great fury after the appearance of Worcester's dictionary, in 1846. Worcester, who had begun his lexicographical labors by editing Johnson's dictionary, was a good deal more conservative than Webster, and so the partisans of conformity rallied around him, and for [Pg255] a while the controversy took on all the rancor of a personal quarrel. Even the editions of Webster printed after his death, though they gave way on many points, were violently arraigned. Gould, in 1867, belabored the editions of 1854 and 1866,[12] and complained that "for the past twenty-five years the Websterian replies have uniformly been bitter in tone, and very free in the imputation of personal motives, or interested or improper motives, on the part of opposing critics." At this time Webster himself had been dead for twenty-two years. Schele de Vere, during the same year, denounced the publishers of the Webster dictionaries for applying "immense capital and a large stock of energy and perseverance" to the propagation of his "new and arbitrarily imposed orthography."[13] § 4