might, without loss, have been omitted. But a work of this kind
is not hastily to be charged with superfluities: those quotations,
which to careless or unskilful perusers appear only to repeat
the same sense, will often exhibit, to a more accurate examiner,
diversities of signification, or, at least, afford different shades
of the same meaning: one will shew the word applied to persons,
another to things; one will express an ill, another a good, and a
third a neutral sense; one will prove the expression genuine from
an ancient authour; another will shew it elegant from a modern: a
doubtful authority is corroborated by another of more credit; an
ambiguous sentence is ascertained by a passage clear and determinate;
the word, how often soever repeated, appears with new associates
and in different combinations, and every quotation contributes
something to the stability or enlargement of the language.

When words are used equivocally, I receive them in either sense; when
they are metaphorical, I adopt them in their primitive acceptation.

I have sometimes, though rarely, yielded to the temptation of
exhibiting a genealogy of sentiments, by shewing how one authour
copied the thoughts and diction of another: such quotations are
indeed little more than repetitions, which might justly be censured,
did they not gratify the mind, by affording a kind of intellectual
history.

The various syntactical structures occurring in the examples have
been carefully noted; the licence or negligence with which many
words have been hitherto used, has made our stile capricious and
indeterminate; when the different combinations of the same word are
exhibited together, the preference is readily given to propriety,