This Dictionary of the three quarto volumes was the first edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_,--the identical work in its first beginnings, of which the seventh edition has been so recently completed. It was published in 1771--in the days of Goldsmith, and Burke, and Johnson, and David Hume--several years ere Adam Smith had given his _Wealth of Nations_ or Robertson his _History of America_ to the public, and ere the names of Burns or Cowper had any place in BRITISH LITERATURE. The world has grown greatly in knowledge since that period, and the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ has done much more than kept pace with it in its merits of acquirement. The three volumes have swelled into twenty-one; and each of the twenty-one contains at least one-third more of matter than each of the three. The growth and proportions of a work of genius seem to be very little dependent on the period of its production. Shakespeare may be regarded as the founder of the English drama. He wrote at a time when art was rude, and science comparatively low. All agree, at least, that the subjects of Queen Victoria know a very great deal which was not known by the subjects of Queen Elizabeth. There was no gas burned in front of the Globe Theatre, nor was the distant roar of a _locomotive_ ever heard within its dingy recesses; nor did ever adventurous aeronaut look down from his dizzy elevation of miles on its tub-like proportions, or its gay flag of motley. And yet we question whether even Mr. Wakley himself, with all his advantages, would venture to do more than assert his equality with the Swan of Avon. Homer, too, wrote in a very remote period,--so very remote and so very uncertain, that the critics have begun seriously to doubt whether the huge figure of the blind old man, as it looms through the grey obscure of ages, be in reality the figure of one poet, or of a whole school of poets rolled up into a bundle. But though men fight much more scientifically now than they did at Troy, and know much more about the taking and defending of walled towns, no poet of the present day greatly excels Homer,--no, not the Scotch schoolmaster even who wrote Wolfe's Ode, or the gentleman who sends us abstruse verses which we unluckily cannot understand, and then scolds us in perspicuous prose for not giving them a place in our columns.