meaning of _man_ or _woman_, _dog_ or _cat_[10], they might want a
hint as to their derivation. Bailey had hit the nail aright:
successive editions were called for almost every two years during the
century; when the author died, in 1742, the tenth edition was in the
press. In that of 1731, Bailey first marked the stress-accent, a step
in the direction of indicating pronunciation. In 1730, moreover, he
brought out with the aid of some specialists, his folio dictionary,
the greatest lexicographical work yet undertaken in English, into
which he also introduced diagrams and proverbs. This is an interesting
book historically, for, according to Sir John Hawkins, it formed the
working basis of Dr. Johnson[11].

Bailey had many imitators and rivals, nearly all of whom aimed, like
him, at including all words; of these I need only name Dyche and
Pardon 1735, B.N. Defoe 1735, and Benjamin Martin 1749.

During the second quarter of the century, the feeling arose among
literary men, as well as among the booksellers, that the time had come
for the preparation of a 'Standard Dictionary' of the English tongue.
The language had now attained a high degree of literary perfection; a
perfect prose style, always a characteristic of maturity, had been
created; a brilliant galaxy of dramatists and essayists--Dryden, Pope,
Addison, Steele, Swift, Defoe--had demonstrated that English was
capable of expressing clearly and elegantly everything that needed to
be expressed in language. The age of Queen Anne was compared to the
Ciceronian age of Latin, or the age of Aristotle and Plato in Greek.
But in both these cases, as indeed in that of every known ancient
people, the language, after reaching its acme of perfection, had begun
to decay and become debased: the golden age of Latinity had passed
into a silvern, and that into a brazen and an iron age. The fear was