The Sun.
London, England, 1852-10-22 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases. By Peter
Mark Roget, M.D., F.R.S,, &c. Longman, Brown,
Green, and Longmans.
Au E nglishman's library cannot—we say it advisedly
—be regarded as complete without this magnificent
product of industry and erudition : without any one
exception the most remarkable treasury of the lan-
guage. Henceforth, we doubt not but that every in-
telligent scholar in the United Kingdom will as sedu-
lously turn for assistance to Dr. Roget's "Thesaurus"
as he has hitherto been accustomed to refer in all mo-
ments of verbal difficulty to the aid of Dr. Johnson's
" Dictionary." It must not be imagined, however,
by those who are unacquainted with the work here
submitted to our criticism, that it encroaches in any
way whatever upon the ground hitherto occupied by
the great lexicographer. Dr. Roger, in carrying out
his laborious enterprize, has proceeded in a totally op-
posite direction—he has not arranged and classified the
words in order to obtain the ideas, but, reversing the
system, has arranged and classified the ideas in order
to obtain the words. It is the first time in the his-
tory of literature that an undertaking of this charac-
ter has been actually accomplished. Frequently it
may have been contemplated as practicable, but
hitherto it has seemed to evade the grasp of realiza-
tion. The indefatigable energy, the eclectic know-
ledge, and the indomitable perseverance of Dr. Roget
have at length, however, achieved what has heretofore
seemed to be the despair of the most active and en-
lightened philologists. He has bees engaged upon
his Herculean task, we are not surprised to learn,
during many years past, and the extraordinary volume
now published by the eminent house of Longman is
the fruit consequently of a research entitled to our
most grateful consideration. As the title-page sig-
nificantly intimates, the work will be found to "faci-
litate the expression of ideas," and thereby, of course,to
aid very materially in the process of literary compo-
sition. A more acceptable boon could not have been
contrived, whether the compiler considered the re-
quirements of the most shallow tyro or of the most
veteran bibliographer. Horne Tooke had already,
long ago, pointed with his steady nervous finger the
nature of this grand desideratum. Listen, in testi-
mony of this, to the declaration contained in that one
terse but pithytsentence of the terrea nreposera—" It
is impossible we should thoroughly understand the
nature of the signs, unless we first properly consider
and arrange the things signified." "It is impossible"
—that was the avowal of a great and profound philo-
logistaUTOr. Et7rfl,--" it is impossible." " Rather,
however, should he say now, " It was impossible."
for the dream of Tooke has become the reality of
Roget. The " things signified" have been here, both
" considered and arranged"—considered with all pos-
sible caution, and arranged with all imaginable adroit-
ness—by the keen eye and rapid hand of the author
of " Thesaurus." Everybody knows well enough
that the problem submitted to himself for solution by
the lexicographer, is simply :—The word being given,
to find the idea it is intended to convey, or, in other
words, to discover its signification. In the really won-
derful compilation before us, the problem to be solved is
different. It is this :—The idea being given to find the
word, or words, by which the idea may be most fitly
and aptly expressed. Surely the advantage of a pro-
duction accomplishing this must be, at a glance, suf-
ficiently apparent. Whether he be a writer or not—
there cannot possibly be a man amongst the more in-
telligent classes of the population who has not occa-
sionally experienced the embarrassing sense of a very
painful inaccuracy, or let us say, at least of a scarcely
less painful inadequacy of diction for the revelation of
thoughts or emotions burning in his head or heart for
the relief of utterance. As affording aid at these
moments, the " Thesaurus" must infallibly prove a
resource altogether inestimable. It has permanently
stamped its author's name upon the annals of English
literature as one of our ripest scholars, and one of
our most accomplished philologists.
Was it Fox who said it of Pitt, or Pitt of Fox?
Whoever the author or the object of the eulogium,
however, it is on record somewhere among the anec-
dotes of our national rhetoricians, that it was re-
marked of a brother orator by one of the most elo-
quent luminaries of the British Parliament, " I never
want a word, but he never wants the word !" A
panegyric not capable of very frequent application,
otherwise we should not so frequently encounter, even
in the writings of our most eminent men of letters,
passages of bewildering involution or of stilted
phraseology,—a style happily termed by Dr. Roget,
one " at once laboured and obscure, vapid or redun-
dant, or vitiated by the still graver fault of affectation
or ambiguity." Our conceptions are, moreover, some-
times so fleeting in form, and so subtle in peculiarity,
that a rapid command of diction is essential not only
for their communication to others, but even for their
exact appreciation by ourselves. Thought becomes at
these moments too variable, and, so to speak, vola-
tile in its evanescence, to be followed up without
extraordinary difficulty through all the sequence
of concatenation—and this, more especially, in the
more abstract reveries superinduced by either ethical
or metaphysical investigation. Under this be-
wilderment we may be fain to cry out in the
despairing tones of Horace, Quo tow= vultus
mutantem Protea nodo P Dr. Roget replies to that
appeal by his " Thesaurus." He removes the diffi-
culties which have until now stood, for some insur-
mountably, in the way of graceful and perspicuous
composition. If there be no royal road to learning,
he has at any rate macadamized the old republican
path-way which the majority have traversed only
with unalleviated pain, and unmitigated difficulty.
The manner in which he has accomplished this, is to
us one of the most surprising miracles yet performed
in the miraculous development of our language. He
has contrived—necessarily—a perfectly novel system
of classification. This system, we may observe, can
be at once comprehended with facility by an exami-
nation of his very lucid and ingenious "Tabular Sy-
nopsis of Categories." First of all, he separates the
ideas that require to be catalogued into classes, he
subdivides these classes into sections, and, lastly, he
numbers the minor fragments into which those sec-
tions have, in the end, been paragraphed. In order,
if possible, to explain this skilful system of classifica-
tion, we would observe, for instance, that Dr. Roget
has contented himself with distributing the whole
mass of his materials into Six Classes, separating
these classes variously into what constitutes, in the
aggregate, Twenty-four Sections, and partitioning the
whole yet more minutely into what reaches altogether
the sum total of exactly One Thousand Paragraphs.
The six classes are—l. Abstract Relations. IL Space.
111. Matter. IV. Intellect. V. Volition. VI. Af-
fections. Under the First Class, that of Abstract
Relations, we have as Sections-1. Existence (Nos. 1
to 8) ; `el. Relation (Nos. 9 to 24) ; 3. Quantity (Nos.
25 to 57) ; 4. Order (Nos. 58 to 83) ; 5. Number
(Nos. 84 to 105); 6. Time (Nos. 106 to 139) ; 7.
Change (Nos. 140 to 152) ; 8. Causation (Nos. 153 to
179). The example here given of a distinct class
with the manner of its division into sections, and of
its subdivision into paragraphs, will sufficiently dis-
play the ingenuity of the method adopted by our phi-
lologist in his arrangement. " Space," in like manner,
has for its sections four; namely,—Generally, Dimen-
sions, Form, and Motion. " Matter" has three—
Generally, Inorganic, and Organic. "Intellect" two
—Formation of Ideas and Communication of Ideas.
" Volition," two, —lndividual, and Intersocial. And
Affections," the last of the classes, six—Generally,
Personal, Sympathetic, Moral, and Religious.
How all this is accomplished in the details, details
necessarily elaborate, and, to the superficial observer,
seemingly almost infinitesimal, may be very readily
recognized, as before indicated, by even a superficial
glance down the Tabular Synopsis of Categories. It
must not be conjectured, however, from what has been
already remarked in the present criticism, that the
labours of Dr. Roget have been restricted to a mere
catalogue of words. Enormous as that task alone
' would have been, he has not contented himself with
accomplishing it in the goodly volume under consi-
deration, but to the individual words themselves he
has added a copious variety of phrases and forms of
expression, some of them composed of several words,
as, for instance, " to have a finger in the pie," or " to
turn over a new leaf"—phrases which, according to
the all-embracing judgment of the compiler, " are of
such frequent use as to entitle them to rank among the
constituent parts of the language." All-embracing
we have termed his judgment, and assuredly not with-
out reason, seeing that the " Thesaurus" contains
much that would have gladdened the heart of Cat-
nach, while it would infallibly have tasted not more
pleasantly than asafetida in the nostrils of Chester-
field.
We can't help thinking that good, industrious Dr.
he is Roget, must infallibly be a bit of a wag,
Basut for his
cer-
tainly a great deal of a philosopfher.
fun through the
partiality for a little sprinkling”o
drier details of the " Thesaurus,"
360) under the head
possibility have discovered (N,o,.tocould never by
hop the twig," and
of " Death," such phrases as
admitting these
"to kick the bucket." Although b
uyrrent enough in
forms of expression—undoubtedlynderedu himself liable to
society—the compiler
hayserr -lenient to mere slang and
the accusation of being
vulgarisms, he has, nevertheless thereby only yielded
a new and vivid evidence of his a
anxiety to give his
work
the most desirable of all merits for such an un-
dertaking—the broad and
ispa ramount merit of com.
pleteness. Occasionally, it true,blemishes may
reasonably enough, in so complex and novel an enter-
prize, be detected, either through an error of omission
or through
One of classification. Everything duly
considered, the whole of the enormous difficulty of the
task being borne in recollection, it must, however, be
acknowledged upon all hands, that Dr. Roget has at-
tained a degree of accuracy and completeness that no
one would have ventured to predict for an early
issue of
the " Thesaurus." If it were in no other re-
spect advantageous to the cause of our national litera-
ture, the volume would be welcome, seeing that by no
less than four words—irrelation, amorphism, sinistra.