through. The first advance upon this is seen in the Epinal Glossary,
which uses part at least of the materials of the Leiden, incorporating
with them many others. This glossary has advanced to _first-letter_
order: all the A-words come together, followed by all the B-words, and
so on to Z, but there is no further arrangement under the individual
letters[1]. There are nearly fourteen columns of words beginning with
A, containing each about forty entries; the whole of these 550 entries
must be looked through to see if a given word occurs in this glossary.
The third stage is represented by the Corpus Glossary, which contains
the materials of its predecessors, and a great deal more, and in which
the alphabetical arrangement has been carried as far as the second
letter of each word: thus the first ninety-five words explained begin
with Ab-, and the next seventy-eight with Ac-, and so on, but the
alphabetization goes no further[2]; the glossary is in _second-letter_
order. In at least one glossary of the tenth century, contained in a
MS. of the British Museum (Harl. 3376), the alphabetical arrangement
has been carried as far as the third letter, beyond which point it
does not appear to have advanced.

The MS. of the Corpus Glossary dates to the early part of the eighth
century; the Epinal and Erfurt--although the MS. copies that have come
down to us are not older, or not so old--must from their nature go
back as glossaries to a still earlier date, and the Leiden to an
earlier still; so that we carry back these beginnings of lexicography
in England to a time somewhere between 600 and 700 A.D., and probably
to an age not long posterior to the introduction of Christianity in
the south of England at the end of the sixth century. Many more
vocabularies were compiled between these early dates and the eleventh
century; and it is noteworthy that those ancient glossaries and
vocabularies not only became fuller and more orderly as time advanced,