...from any care to grace my pages with modern decorations, that I have studiously endeavoured to collect examples and authorities from the writers before the...undefiled, as the pure sources of genuine diction." It may seem paradoxical that Johnson, who accepted the view of the "reform of our numbers" in the last...

...good to ignore. Johnson, for instance, wtites in the preface to his dictionary of 'the wtiters hefore the Restoration, whose works I regard as "the wells of English undefiled'" (fol. ci t). Prompted hy either Spenser or Johnson, the Unitatian advocate of revision, John R. Beard,...

...from any care to grace my pages with modern decorations, that I have studiously endeavoured to collect examples and authorities from the writers before the...restoration, whose works I regard as the wells of English wtde/tied, as the pure sources of genuine diction. Our language, for almost a century, has, by the...

...describe the "proper" use of words. Johnson purposely limited his corpus to works that he regarded "as the wells of English undefiled, as the pure sources of genuine diction" (Johnson 1755, preface, page 7). Even other dictionaries, which were meant to be more complete and...

...the phrase was too good to ignore. Johnson, for instance, writes in the preface to his dictionary of 'the writers before the Restoration, whose works I regard as "the wells of English undefiled'" (fol. Cir). Prompted by either Spenser or Johnson, the Unitarian advocate of revision, John R. Beard,...

...endeavoured to collect examples and authorities from the writers before the restoration, whose works 1 regard as the wells of English undefiled, as the pure sources of genuine diction. Samuel Johnson, 1755, A Dictionary of the English Language, Preface 24:18 [Johnson] 'By collecting...

...of the language by canonizing its written forms (as available, in Johnson's opinion, primarily from writers before the restoration, "whose works I regard as the wells of English undefiled." (X, 52). Contemporary speech, on the other hand, was "copious without order, energetic without rules.")...

...admitted only "writers of the first reputation." Spenser moreover gives Johnson his designation for "the writers before the restoration, whose works I regard as the wells of English undefiled."*6 But for all his fondness for Spenser, Johnson saw the same problems as his contemporaries,...

...excesses of contemporary written styles, on the other, he has, he says, "studiously endeavoured to collect examples and authorities from the writers before the...undefiled, as the pure sources of genuine diction" (319). Authorized by English tradition, Johnson comes down decisively on the side of a written standard...

...the English language's better days and, like Sprat, dates its decline to the mid-seventeenth century: "our language, for almost a century, has, by the concurrence...of many causes, been gradually departing from its original Teutonic character, and deviating towards a Gallic structure and phraseology, from which it...