scholar, to whom we owe one of our best Greek lexicons, a book which
must have cost him years, speaking in the preface of his completed work
with a just disdain of some, who complained of the irksome drudgery of
such toils as those which had engaged him so long,--toils irksome,
forsooth, because they only had to do with words. He disclaims any part
with those who asked pity for themselves, as so many galley-slaves
chained to the oar, or martyrs who had offered themselves for the good
of the literary world. He declares that the task of classing, sorting,
grouping, comparing, tracing the derivation and usage of words, had
been to him no drudgery, but a delight and labour of love. [Footnote:
It is well worth the while to read on this same subject the pleasant
_causerie_ of Littre 'Comment j'ai fait mon Dictionnaire.' It is to be
found pp. 390-442 of his _Glanures_.]

And if this may be true in regard of a foreign tongue, how much truer
ought it to be in regard of our own, of our 'mother tongue,' as we
affectionately call it. A great writer not very long departed from us
has borne witness at once to the pleasantness and profit of this study.
'In a language,' he says, 'like ours, where so many words are derived
from other languages, there are few modes of instruction more useful or
more amusing than that of accustoming young people to seek for the
etymology or primary meaning of the words they use. There are cases in
which more knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the history of a
word than by the history of a campaign.' So writes Coleridge; and
impressing the same truth, Emerson has somewhere characterized language
as 'fossil poetry.' He evidently means that just as in some fossil,
curious and beautiful shapes of vegetable or animal life, the graceful
fern or the finely vertebrated lizard, such as now, it may be, have
been extinct for thousands of years, are permanently bound up with the
stone, and rescued from that perishing which would else have been their