Borne in the West? liue there? so far from Court? From Oxford, Cambridge, London? yet report (Now in these daies of Eloquence) such change Of words? vnknown? vntaught? tis new and strange. Let Gallants therefore skip no more from hence To Italic, France, Spaine, and with expence Waste time and faire estates, to learne new fashions Of complementall phrases, soft temptations To glorious beggary: Here let them hand This Booke; here studie, reade, and vnderstand: Then shall they find varietie at Home, As curious as at Paris, or at Rome. For my part I confesse, hadst not thou writ, I had not beene acquainted with more wit Than our old English taught; but now I can Be proud to know I have a Countryman Hath strugled for a fame, and what is more, Gain'd it by paths of Art, vntrod before. The benefit is generall; the crowne Of praise particular, and thats _thine owne_. What should I say? thine owne deserts inspire thee, Twere base to enuie, I must then admire thee. A friend and louer of thy paines, IOHN FORD. And a deeply interesting little book is this diminutive ancestor of the modern English Dictionary, to describe which adequately would take far more time than the limits of this lecture afford. It is divided into three parts: Part I contains the hard words with their explanation in ordinary language; and instructive it is to see what words were then considered hard and unknown. Many of them certainly would be so still: as, for example, _abgregate_, 'to lead out of the flock'; _acersecomick_, 'one whose hair was never cut'; _adcorporated_, 'married'; _adecastick_, 'one that will do just howsoever'; _bubulcitate_, 'to cry like a cow-boy'; _collocuplicate_, 'to enrich'--concerning which we wonder who used them, or where Cockeram found them; but we are surprised to find among these hard words _abandon_, _abhorre_, _abrupt_, _absurd_, _action_, _activitie_, and _actresse_, explained as 'a woman doer,' for the stage actress had not yet appeared. _Blunder_, 'to bestir oneself,' and _Garble_, 'to clense things from dust,' remind us that the meanings of words are subject to change. The Second Part contains the ordinary words 'explained' by their hard equivalents, and is intended to teach a learned style. The plain man or gentlewoman may write a letter in his or her natural language, and then by turning up the simple words in the dictionary alter them into their learned equivalents. Thus 'abound' may be altered into _exuperate_, 'too great plenty' into _uberty_, 'he and I are of one age' into _we are coetaneous_, 'youthful babbling' into _juvenile inaniloquence_--a useful expression to hurl at an opponent in the Oxford Union.