But as every language has a time of rudeness antecedent to
perfection, as well as of false refinement and declension, I have
been cautious lest my zeal for antiquity might drive me into times
too remote, and croud my book with words now no longer understood.
I have fixed Sidney's work for the boundary, beyond which I make few
excursions. From the authours which rose in the time of Elizabeth,
a speech might be formed adequate to all the purposes of use and
elegance. If the language of theology were extracted from Hooker
and the translation of the Bible; the terms of natural knowledge
from Bacon; the phrases of policy, war, and navigation from Raleigh;
the dialect of poetry and fiction from Spenser and Sidney; and the
diction of common life from Shakespeare, few ideas would be lost to
mankind, for want of English words, in which they might be expressed.

It is not sufficient that a word is found, unless it be so combined
as that its meaning is apparently determined by the tract and tenour
of the sentence; such passages I have therefore chosen, and when
it happened that any authour gave a definition of a term, or such
an explanation as is equivalent to a definition, I have placed
his authority as a supplement to my own, without regard to the
chronological order, that is otherwise observed.

Some words, indeed, stand unsupported by any authority, but they are
commonly derivative nouns or adverbs, formed from their primitives
by regular and constant analogy, or names of things seldom occurring
in books, or words of which I have reason to doubt the existence.

There is more danger of censure from the multiplicity than paucity
of examples; authorities will sometimes seem to have been accumulated
without necessity or use, and perhaps some will be found, which