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This is a dictionary, not to be consulted, but to be read through both for delight and for instruction. It is one of the most fascinating books of the time. We can best define it by terming it a biographical dictionary of words. Biographical we say; for words have life, and sometimes they die before the language to which they belong; and while they live, they move, they drop and take on significations, they are called to new services with the growth or modification of science, art, and social refinement. Conversely, the biography of words embodies large and momentous sections of human history. How much, for instance, is told by the contrast between the Latin privilegium and the English privilege, the former capable of a bad sense [a priva lex against an individual], as when Cicero complains of the demolition of his house as a privilegium, - the latter indicating that Christian civilization, whatever it may do, will recognize exceptions only in favor of individuals! How much of spiritual history is comprehended in the fact that Tertullian, the Christian, was the first writer known to have used tribulatio to denote affliction, thus marking the advent into Christian consciousness of the threshing ministry for God's wheat of what were previously regarded only as burdens and sorrows! Of such items of history the volume now before us is full. The English author must have made these inquiries the study of a lifetime, and the additions by our learned countryman are such as we should have anticipated from his previous labors in this department. Were the reconstruction of our orthography on phonographic principles possible, which it is not, and were it on other grounds expedient, a sufficient and conclusive objection would be found in the bearing which it would have on the history of thought. It is our silent letters and our anomalous combinations of letters that connect our words with their origin, and make them waymarks of the progress of our race.... --The North American Review, Volume 95

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