Mario de Calasio (1550–1620), a Franciscan scholar from Calascio, near L’Aquila in the Abruzzo region of Italy, devoted his life to compiling a massive dictionary and concordance of the Hebrew language. His vast work was published posthumously in Rome in 1620. One hundred and twenty-five years later—14 March 1745—the Reverend William Romaine (1717–95), a student of Hebrew at Oxford from 1731 to 1737, issued proposals for a new edition, with corrections and additions. Although he did not share the perfectionism of the Oxford Methodists, Romaine was, like John Wesley and George Whitefield, an evangelical Anglican clergyman. He was also influenced by the theories of John Hutchinson (1674–1737), who believed that biblical Hebrew is God-given and contains spiritual mysteries in the structure of its vocabulary and grammar. It is unsurprising, therefore, that Romaine devoted his Oxford lectures (1739) to refuting William Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses (1738–41), which argued against the presence of spiritual meaning in the language of the Bible (paradoxically, because the spirit was present to the biblical authors). Romaine’s belief in the spiritual meaning of Hebrew also explains his interest in revising and augmenting Calasio’s great work with its preface on the divine origin of Hebrew, which he calls the mother of all languages,1 its lists of cognates in Arabic and Chaldaic for each Hebrew word, and its concordance linking each meaning to multiple biblical passages.

Romaine published the first two volumes of the revised Calasio on 29 April 1747, the third volume in 1748, and the fourth in 1749. Although we have not scrupulously compared Romaine’s edition with the original, it does not appear that Romaine made a great many changes to Calasio’s work. The project, however, is vast and learned, and merely correcting it must have required great labor. It certainly required a large outlay of money on the part of the publishers for paper and for typesetting in multiple alphabets, including a new Hebrew font by William Caslon. After Romaine’s proposals for the edition were published in mid-March 1745,2 the booksellers backing the project—including several associated with Johnson—Thomas Osborne, Andrew Millar, James Hodges, and Robert Dodsley—carried out an advertising campaign for subscriptions in the newspapers. By the spring of 1746, however, the booksellers changed tactics, probably feeling that it was necessary to ramp up their promotional activities because of light sales. On 23 May, they published Some Remarks on the Progress of Learning Since the Reformation, a twenty-two-page pamphlet which reprints the proposals for the dictionary and concordance, preceded by a ten-page essay by Romaine,3 preceded in turn by a ten-page introductory essay by an anonymous “stranger to the editor, and a friend to learning.” To further the illusion that the essay was disinterested, the names of the booksellers were omitted from the imprint. Only Mary Cooper, Dodsley’s close associate and the leading trade publisher of her day, had her name on the title page.

Although the introductory essay might have been written at any time after the publication of Romaine’s proposals in mid-March until early May 1746, it is likely that it was written close to the date of publication. That would place its composition very close to 30 April 1746, the date on which Johnson finished his “Short Scheme for Compiling a New Dictionary of the English Language,” the first draft of his Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language. Johnson’s involvement with Dodsley, established by this time, and the subject of the essay—a clear interest of Johnson’s, as his work on the Harleian materials shows (see pp. 74–106 above)—provide circumstantial evidence that Johnson was the author. In addition, the rhetorical strategies, syntax, and diction of the introductory essay are consistent with those in Johnson’s writing of about the same time. Although the absence of external evidence makes this attribution tentative, we are largely persuaded that the work is Johnson’s.4 We note a few verbal parallels with works known to be by Johnson, although we know these do not provide conclusive evidence of authorship. The text below is from the first and only edition. We have made a few emendations to correct obvious typographical errors and noted them in the apparatus.