MEMOIR OF THfi LATE MR. JOHN JOST, OF BDKY. 



107 



years engaged, during the little leisure he possessed, in making 

 a collection of words, which he was tracing through different 

 languages and dialects to one common root. Of late years, as 

 the Herculean character of this labour pressed upon his mind, 

 together with the growing consciousness that the springs of 

 life were beginning to fail, he used to say that if he did not 

 live long enough to complete his work, at all events he should 

 leave something by which to be remembered after he was 

 gone; and that if he should not live to publish it himself, he 

 should leave it to some society, on condition that they gave it 

 publication. I have had an opportunity of examining this 

 ** Dictionary," which, in four quarto volumes, contains several 

 thousand words. First is given the English word; next its 

 immediate derivation, and from what language; third, its 

 meaning, and lastly the words of like significance from other 

 languages, all traceable to the same root. He appears pur- 

 posely to have omitted from his plan all word^ derived from 

 the Latin or Greek, or from the British; and his Lexicon com- 

 prises mainly the words having their origin in the Teutonic, 

 Scandinavian, and Gothic tongues- At an earlier period, he 

 had begun in the same volumes to note down Hebrew words 

 having aiEnity for English ones. In this work he was engaged 

 «ven till within a few weeks of his decease, — as long, indeed, 

 as he could hold the pen ; and its last thirty-t\Vo pages cotitain 

 some two hundred words, the derivations of which, and their 

 roots, must be traced, if at all, by some other hand. 



Subordinate and auxiliary to this, he was engaged in another 

 philological compilation, which occupies two quarto volumes 

 in MS., and which he has himself entitled "A Glossary of 

 the Westmorland Dialect, as spoken in the neighbourhood of 

 Kendal." This is alphabetically arranged,' and under each 

 archaic word is given a short illustrative phrase or sentence in 

 the Westmorland dialect; and to this is occasionally appended 

 the derivation of the word from some Scandinavian or Anglo- 

 Saxon root. So long ago as Aujjust, 1843, he writes to a 



