Modern Languages. 95 



guages, which may be supposed to have received 

 the greatest number of improvements during the 

 last century, and to be most worthy of notice. 6 



ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 



The English Language has received, during this 

 period, a large portion of the improvements which 

 have been mentioned. From the middle of the 

 sixteenth to the commencement of the eighteenth 

 century, English style had been in a regular course 

 of refinement and general melioration. The great 

 British Lexicographer, Dr. Johnson, tells us that 

 the writings of Sir Philip Sidney, who died in 

 1583, furnish a boundary beyond which he made 

 few excursions in search of the " wells of English 

 undefiled."' After Sidney, the important suc- 

 cessive improvements conferred on our language 

 by Shakspeare, Hooker, Milton, Clarendon, 

 Temple, Tillotson, Sprat,Dryden, and Locke, 

 pre well known, and have been frequently the sub- 

 jects of eulogium by the literary historian. But 

 still these writers left many defects to be supplied. 

 Their respective styles, though various, w T ere, for 

 the most part, formal, feeble^ circuitous, abound- 

 ing with excrescences, and cumbrous parts, and 

 in many instances perplexed, inaccurate, and in- 

 elegant to a very high degree. These charges, in- 

 deed, do not equally belong to all that have been 



b In the following sections the intelligent reader will observe that the 

 Italian, the Spanish, the Dutch, and several other important dialects of 

 modern Europe, are omitted. The reason for this omission is the best in 

 the world. It is because the author knows so little of those languages, and 

 is so entirely ignorant of the details of improvement which they have re- 

 ceived, that he cannot undertake to state them. It is presumed, however, 

 that the improvements which have lately taken place in most of the culti- 

 vated living languages, respectively, agree in so many respects, that the 

 exhibition of those which belong to one may be considered as applying in 

 a considerable degree to the rest. 



c Preface to the Dictionary of the Engliib Language . 



