In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it not be forgotten that much likewise is performed; and though no book was ever spared out of tenderness to the authour, and the world is little solicitous to know whence proceeded the faults of that which it condemns; yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it that the _English Dictionary_ was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academick bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow. It may repress the triumph of malignant criticism to observe, that if our language is not here fully displayed, I have only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto completed. If the lexicons of ancient tongues, now immutably fixed, and comprised in a few volumes, be yet, after the toil of successive ages, inadequate and delusive; if the aggregated knowledge, and co-operating diligence of the _Italian_ academicians, did not secure them from the censure of _Beni_; if the embodied criticks of _France_, when fifty years had been spent upon their work, were obliged to change its oeconomy, and give their second edition another form, I may surely be contented without the praise of perfection, which, if I could obtain, in this gloom of solitude, what would it avail me? I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.
This extract is taken from the fourth edition, London, MDCCLXXIII, the last to receive Johnson's corrections. If you possibly can get the opportunity, turn these volumes over enough to find a few of the whimsical definitions, such, for example, as that of lexicographer, according to Johnson "a writer of dictionaries, a _harmless drudge_." Other words worth looking up are _excise_, _oats_, and _networks_.
=21= 6. =Junius and Skinner.= Johnson frankly admitted that for etymologies he turned to the shelf which contained the etymological dictionaries of these seventeenth-century students of the Teutonic languages. This phase of dictionary making was not considered so deeply then as it is now.