How far this unexpected distinction can be rated among the happy
incidents of life, I am not yet able to determine. Its first effect has
been to make me anxious, lest it should fix the attention of the publick
too much upon me; and, as it once happened to an epick poet of France,
by raising the reputation of the attempt, obstruct the reception of the
work. I imagine what the world will expect from a scheme, prosecuted
under your Lordship's influence; and I know that expectation, when her
wings are once expanded, easily reaches heights which performance never
will attain; and when she has mounted the summit of perfection, derides
her follower, who dies in the pursuit.

Not, therefore, to raise expectation, but to repress it, I here lay
before your Lordship the plan of my undertaking, that more may not be
demanded than I intend; and that, before it is too far advanced to be
thrown into a new method, I may be advertised of its defects or
superfluities. Such informations I may justly hope, from the emulation
with which those, who desire the praise of elegance or discernment, must
contend in the promotion of a design that you, my Lord, have not thought
unworthy to share your attention with treaties and with wars.

In the first attempt to methodise my ideas I found a difficulty, which
extended itself to the whole work. It was not easy to determine by what
rule of distinction the words of this dictionary were to be chosen. The
chief intent of it is to preserve the purity, and ascertain the meaning
of our English idiom; and this seems to require nothing more than that
our language be considered, so far as it is our own; that the words and
phrases used in the general intercourse of life, or found in the works
of those whom we commonly style polite writers, be selected, without
including the terms of particular professions; since, with the arts to
which they relate, they are generally derived from other nations, and