EXCISE. . . . A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.

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.

DULL. . . . Not exhilarating; not delightful; as, to make dictionaries is dull work .

But these were the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer.

I have studiously endeavored to collect examples and authorities from the writers before the restoration, whose works I regard as the wells of English undefiled , as the pure sources of genuine diction.

Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach.

I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven .

Such is the delight of mental superiority, that none on whom nature or study have conferred it, would purchase the gifts of fortune by its loss.

To neglect at any time preparation for death, is to sleep on our post at a siege, but to omit it in old age, is to sleep at an attack.

More knowledge may be gained of a man’s real character, by a short conversation with one of his servants, than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree and ended with his funeral.