into an alphabetical series, I soon discovered that the bulk of my
volumes would fright away the student, and was forced to depart from my
scheme of including all that was pleasing or useful in English
literature, and reduce my transcripts very often to clusters of words,
in which scarcely any meaning is retained: thus to the weariness of
copying, I was condemned to add the vexation of expunging. Some passages
I have yet spared, which may relieve the labour of verbal searches, and
intersperse with verdure and flowers the dusty deserts of barren
philology.

The examples, thus mutilated, are no longer to be con sidered as
conveying the sentiments or doctrine of their authors; the word, for the
sake of which they are inserted, with all its appendant clauses, has
been carefully preserved; but it may sometimes happen, by hasty
detruncation, that the general tendency of the sentence may be changed:
the divine may desert his tenets, or the philosopher his system.

Some of the examples have been taken from writers who were never
mentioned as masters of elegance, or models of style; but words must be
sought where they are used; and in what pages, eminent for purity, can
terms of manufacture or agriculture be found? Many quotations serve no
other purpose, than that of proving the bare existence of words, and
are, therefore, selected with less scrupulousness than those which are
to teach their structures and relations.

My purpose was to admit no testimony of living authors, that I might not
be misled by partiality, and that none of my contemporaries might have
reason to complain; nor have I departed from this resolution, but when
some performance of uncommon excellence excited my veneration, when my
memory supplied me from late books with an example that was wanting, or