his views on the matter (having first reasserted very eloquently the indebtedness of all Frenchmen to the ex-Premier during the War), 'M. Clemenceau certainly entered into them and carried them through with the same patriotic ardour, but, not less certainly, it would be childish to deny that the Versailles Treaty has been a profound disappointment to France.'

It is, of course, M. Poincaré's general attitude towards the Reparations problem since the Versailles Conference, and more especially since he resumed the Premiership, that has brought upon him the condemnation of his English critics: to hear the name Poincaré now is to begin discussing the Ruhr. That subject is far too big for adequate treatment here, but three observations suggest themselves: first, that the French Premier, by virtue of his standing and antecedents, is entitled to be treated as a gentleman and as a humane and honourable man; secondly, that in the eyes of impartial onlookers Great Britain, while she retains the pick of the German Colonies, cannot without the grossest Pharisaism accuse France of cruelty to a fallen foe; thirdly, that it is mere folly to contend, as four-fifths of the English Press have been contending, that in the eyes of all intelligent people,' M. Poincaré's Ruhr policy is both a blunder and

a crime.

Ten years hence we shall be able to discuss this difficult question with more coolness and with fuller knowledge than to-day. To-day, most assuredly, intelligent people are not unanimous upon it. Even in England, where trade interests preclude an entirely unprejudiced view, the occupation of the Ruhr has been defended with weighty and telling arguments by men whose qualification to speak on such problems is beyond dispute it will suffice to mention one, Mr Hartley Withers. Outside England, and notably in the United States, there has been no lack of intelligent support for France. Public sentiment in this country, after a brief moment of rather obvious disapproval,' wrote a wellinformed journalist, Mr Frank H. Simonds, in the American Review of Reviews' for March, has increasingly swung to the French side'; and, speaking from

·

* See the 'Saturday Review,' January 27 and May 19, 1923.

intimate familiarity with French life, he added: 'The dominant sentiment in the France which I know is not materialistic or imperialistic in the ordinary sense; it is a will to live.' *

And here is this detached observer's summing-up of the whole controversy: 'Had Britain stood solidly with France, Germany would have made an honest effort to meet reparations.'

The contemptuous abuse with which for many months past some English leader-writers † have attacked M. Poincaré has been astonishing. They have talked at him in the tones of an excitable school-teacher scolding the disgrace of the class. It would be a good thing if they could model themselves a little on the French Premier's own controversial methods, which are admirable in their suavity and sanity. He can be sharp and challenging but he is never violent or discourteous. 'Le style, c'est l'homme-M. Poincaré's literary style tells us what he is: no intellectual giant, no inspired genius, no saint, but just a grave, thoughtful, cultured, kindly man, immensely industrious, supremely efficient, level-headed, determined, heart and soul a patriot and a Republican; not the man-as one wiseacre would have us believe to act as catspaw to the perfervid M. Léon Daudet, novelist and essayist of note but, for all his energy and vehemence, politician pour rire; still less likely-though many people maintain as much-to be the foolish accomplice of sinister Money-Kings; but recognisable least of all as that wicked incarnation of Imperialism and Revenge and sheer Malignity depicted for us by the English Press with such wearisome repetition week after week.

FREDERIC WHYTE.

Mr J. E. C. Bodley, author of the great book on France, has recently expressed this view also.

There have, of course, been some distinguished exceptions, among them Mr J. A. Spender.

Art. 11.-THE ENGLISH DICTIONARY.

1. A Dictionary of the English Language. By Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Sixth Edition. London, 1785.

2. A New English Dictionary. Edited by Sir James A. H. Murray, Dr Henry Bradley, Dr W. A. Craigie, and Mr C. T. Onions. Oxford University Press, 1888. (In process of publication.)

3. The English Dialect Dictionary. Edited by Joseph Wright. Oxford: University Press, 1898.

4. An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. By Ernest Weekley. Murray, 1921.

THE making of dictionaries is an art which in recent times has taken a bewildering variety of forms. If we recall only such types as dictionaries of science, which may vary from glossaries of technical terms to specialised encyclopædias; dictionaries of biography, which may be national or connected with special classes or crafts; dictionaries of art, which may be concerned with craftsmanship and treat of technique or concerned with taste and deal with the elements of beauty; we realise that the name is legion, even of the classes among which they can be distributed. We also realise that the works thus arranged are so diverse in character that to group them together hardly serves any useful purpose. In fact, the term dictionary is so often misapplied and appropriated to books which have but little relation to diction, that the writer who uses it in an undefined sense can hardly hope to be understood.

Among the works so classed there is one type which is unmistakably authentic-the book which deals with the speech of a people, of a place, or of a time. Thus limited, the class of dictionaries is found to be singularly small. Antiquity has bequeathed to us only fragmentary records in this form. The Museum of the Greek Grammarian Callimachus, who flourished in the third century B.C., is commonly cited as the earliest example. But the work itself is lost and would seem to have been rather critical than lexicographical. We must come to the time of Augustus for the earliest work which appears to be concerned with the meanings of words-the De significatione verborum of Verrius Flaccus. Here again

the work itself is lost; but an abridgment made some four hundred years later by Pompeius Festus has survived, and in a form still further abridged by Paul Diacre has furnished important material to the modern Latin dictionary. Indeed, as Skeat has remarked, a dictionary, in the full sense of the word, was hardly possible before the era of printing. The value of a dictionary confined to the few copies which could be made by hand would be comparatively slight, and the labour of producing it, when private collections of books were small and libraries inaccessible, must have been The dictionary intended to serve the practical ends of instruction in the language treated, seems to have come into existence at Rome, when Greek literature and the Greek language became subjects of study to cultured Romans. We possess as examples of this type of work the 'Onomasticon' of Julius Pollux, the glossary of Attic authors of Harpocration, and a few others of a like kind.

enormous.

It is significant that the Middle Ages have left practically nothing of this order. The Lexicon of Suidas and the Vocabularium of Papias are the principal examples, and it has been much debated whether Suidas lived in the days of the Roman Emperors or in the tenth or fourteenth century A.D. Of Papias it may indeed be said that he flourished in the eleventh century and laboured at the Latin dictionary; but it was the dictionary of a decayed Latin.

With the advent of the printing press a new interest in words arose, and was increased by the study, introduced at the Renaissance, of the ancient tongues, particularly of classical Greek and Latin. From this period the production of dictionaries received assiduous attention, and the names of Constantin, Scapula, Comenius, Schrevelius, Vossius, and finally of Forcellini, whose work is better known under the name of his coadjutor, Facciolati, are associated with the perfecting of the Greek and Latin dictionaries into complete expository treatises upon the language of the classic authors. The progress of this work gave an impulse— first felt in Italy-towards the refining and fixing in literary form of the current speech of modern Europe. Hence arose the great literary dictionaries in various

lands-the Vocabulario degli Accademici della Crusca in Italy, in 1612; the Dictionnaire de l'Academie Française, 1694; and the Dictionary of the Academia Española, published at Madrid in 1726.

The same movement that produced these great dictionaries on the Continent, was active in this country, and found notable expression in various ways, among others in an open letter addressed in the year 1712 by Dean Swift to the Lord Treasurer Harley. Swift worked out and urged upon the Prime Minister the necessity of a scheme for the formation of an English Academy 'to ascertain the English language and fix it for ever,' so putting a term to that change in the forms of words and the idioms of speech which has rendered the English of the Middle Ages largely obsolete.

'The rude Latin,' Swift says, 'of the monks is still very intelligible, whereas had their records been delivered down in the vulgar tongue so barren, so barbarous, so subject to continual and succeeding changes they could not now be understood, unless by antiquaries who make it their study to expound them. . . If things go on at this rate, all I can promise your Lordship is that, about two hundred years hence, some painful compiler, who will be at the trouble of studying old language, may inform the world that, in the reign of Queen Anne, Robert, Earl of Oxford, a very wise and excellent man, was made High Treasurer and saved his country, which in those days was almost ruined by a foreign war and a domestic faction. Thus much he may be able to pick out and willing to transfer to his new history, but the rest of your character. . . will probably be dropped on account of the antiquated style and manner they are delivered in.'

The views which Swift here expresses with such humorous exaggeration were seriously held by him, by Pope, by Chesterfield, presumably also by Harley, to whom Swift commends them as to a sympathiser, and, with a difference, by Johnson himself. In the preface to his Dictionary, at the end of a dissertation on the mutability of English speech and its causes, Johnson

says:

'The great pest of speech is frequency of translation. No book was ever turned from one language into another without imparting something of its native idiom, this is the most