' In similar words, the
title-page of Cockeram's Dictionary proclaims its purpose of 'Enabling
as well Ladies and Gentlewomen ... as also Strangers of any Nation to
the vnderstanding of the more difficult Authors already printed in our
Language, and the more speedy attaining of an elegant perfection of
the English tongue, both in reading, speaking, and writing.' And
Thomas Blount, setting forth the purpose of his _Glossographia_, says,
in words of which one seems to have heard an echo in reference to an
English School in this University, 'It is chiefly intended for the
more-knowing Women, and less-knowing Men; or indeed for all such of
the unlearned, who can but finde in an Alphabet the word they
understand not.'
It is noticeable that all these references to the needs of women
disappear from the later editions, and are wanting in later
dictionaries after 1660; whether this was owing to the fact that the
less-knowing women had now come upsides with the more-knowing men; or
that with the Restoration, female education went out of fashion, and
women sank back again into elegant illiteracy, I leave to the
historian to discover; I only, as a lexicographer, record the fact
that from the Restoration the dictionaries are silent about the
education of women, till we pass the Revolution settlement and reach
the Age of Queen Anne, when J.
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