AND ESSAY ON ENGLISH DICTIONARIES BY THE LATE THOMAS SPENCER BAYNES, LL.B., LL.D. PROFESSOR OF LOGIC, METAPHYSICS AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 1896 [All rights reserved] PREFACE. THOMAS SPENCER BAYNES, the writer of these essays, was born at Wellington, in Somersetshire, on the 24th of March, 1823, and died in London, on the 31st of May, 1887. His father, Joseph Baynes, was for fifty years the minister of the Baptist congregation at Wellington; and his mother, whose maiden name was Ash, was a descendant of Ash, the lexicographer. Thomas Spencer's childhood and early youth were spent in his native Somersetshire, amid scenes and associations which left a deep and permanent impression upon an unusually receptive mind; and the dialect and folk-lore of the district contributed much to the enrichment of his later studies in English. To the simple and pious surroundings of his paternal home there were added many delightful memories of Rumhill House, the neighbouring country seat of Mr. and Mrs. Cadbury, where much of his boyhood was passed. After his too brief school days at Bath and a mistaken attempt to secure for him a commercial career, for which he had no desire, his parents yielded to his urgent wish to qualify for the ministry, and he commenced a two years' course of study in the Baptist College at Bristol. Then, like many Nonconformist students of that day, he was led by a widening ambition, of which the first sign appeared in his matriculation at London, to take a full course of university study in Edinburgh. He was twenty when he went there, and his curriculum lasted five years. Among many potent influences which surrounded him during this period, the strongest was that of Sir William Hamilton, the most learned of Scottish philosophers and one of the most stimulating of teachers. The young student's mind, without losing anything of its seriousness, expanded on all sides, till it became impossible for him to return into the old groove. Scholastic and literary ambitions overbore the aspirations of the preacher. He became the centre of a group of friends, not unremarkable, both within the university and beyond it; and after graduating in the London University in 1850, his influence as a teacher of philosophy in Edinburgh, first at the Philosophical Institution, and afterwards as Sir William Hamilton's assistant, obtained for him a wider recognition. Amongst the most distinguished of his younger associates were Charles Stanford, George Wilson the technologist, and Dallas, afterwards the literary critic of the Times and author of The Gay Science, John Skelton and G. H. Lewes. He was the recognised expositor of the Hamiltonian philosophy, not only in the lecture room, but in authorship. The translation of the Port Royal Logic with a learned introduction, and the Essay on the New Analytic, in which, amongst other logical exposition, Hamilton's invention or discovery of the "quantification of the predicate" was clearly set forth, attracted considerable attention and materially added to his reputation. Altogether, the Edinburgh period, which came to an end, after a partial break-down in health, in 1854, was one both of strenuous exertion and of rich and varied mental experience. There followed two years of comparative retirement and leisure, passed chiefly at Rumhill, which was now his home. There he wrote a tractate on the Somersetshire dialect, which attracted the attention of the late Prince Lucien Bonaparte, and led afterwards to further association between these two students of the varieties of English speech. The essay on Sir William Hamilton in the volume of Edinburgh Essays was written about the same time. Amongst his Edinburgh associates he had been foremost in various journalistic enterprises, and when in 1856 the Leader, a brilliant literary periodical, passed into the hands of his life-long |