All comprehensive and accurate dictionary in ex- To the question, "What popular dictionary is accepted as of the highest authority and value by the people of the United States,"-could there be any more weighty answer than this almost unanimous testimony of the Supreme Court Judges of the Nation and of all the States? Another tribunal may be cited, which in a different field carries not less authority, and which speaks with one voice. The public school systems of the forty-five States are practically a unit in favor of the International. Every one of their State Superintendents recommends it in the highest terms. In every State Normal school it is the accepted standard. Wherever State funds have been appropriated for the purchase of a large dictionary for the schools, Webster's has been the book. The school books of the country, wherever they are of such character as to require a standard in spelling, pronunciation, and definition, follow the International with hardly an exception. The highest judiciary and the entire public school system-better indexes of American opinion can hardly be named. It remains to question that broader constituency which the name "International" suggests, the Englishspeaking peoples beyond America. It has been said that the judgment of foreigners carries a weight like that of posterity, owing to its freedom from local or temporary bias. Taking first Great Britain: the popular test shows a sale of the International far beyond that of any other one-volume dictionary, English or American. The official test is given by the fact that the only Governmental departments of Great Britain using any standard of lan"guage-the Postal and Telegraphic, both managed entirely by the Government-follow the International. The scholar's test may be best indicated, to take from many tributes the most authoritative and impressive, by the unsolicited words of Dr. Murray, editor of the unfinished many-volumed Oxford Dictionary, and probably the highest individual authority on lexicography in the English-speaking world: "In this its latest form, and with its large Supplement and numerous Appendices, Webster's International Dictionary is a wonderful volume, which well maintains its grounds against all rivals, on its own lines.” And again: "The last edition of Webster, the International, is perhaps the best of one-volume dictionaries." In Canada, the International far outsells all rivals. In Australia it has the field to itself, and with special reason; for this great commonwealth has been explored with the utmost thoroughness as to its wealth of new words and usages, by representatives of Webster on the ground, co-operating with the best local scholarship, and reaping a harvest which the home office has winnowed and inwrought with the main work. In the new American Colonies, in South Africa, in India, in China, in Japan, throughout Continental Europe, and wherever flies the Stars and Stripes or the Union Jack, the International goes as a chief symbol and agent of that language which leads the world's civilization. "The story of a book"-it has been shown as a story of supreme concentration; Noah Webster devoting a lifetime of genius, learning, and character to one book; the G. & C. Merriam Company giving their whole energy for sixty years to perfecting and spreading the work. It has been a story of the close alliance of Scholarship and Business; the scholar's thirst for perfection wedded to the business man's sense of practical needs. It is a story of growth, the patriot scholar's lonely dream of an "American Dictionary of the English Language," maturing to an "International Dictionary," the accepted authority of a world-encompassing race. The blue-backed Webster's Speller, of which the public have consumed some seventy-five million copies, conclude with a few pungent fables, "The Milkmaid," "The Old Man's Apple Tree and the Rude Boy," etc., and to each fable was appended a moral. To the present Story the Moral may be given in words a little amplified from an old quotation: All young persons, and all older ones no less, should have a dictionary at their elbow; and while you are about it, get the best-get Webster's International. 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Manuscripts sent to either of the Editors personally are liable to be mislaid or lost. & & CHRONICLE AND COMMENT The Author of "An Englishman in Paris." appear Ten or eleven years ago a good deal of a sensation was created by the ance of a book entitled An Englishman in Paris which purported to be the reminiscences of an Englishman connected. with a titled family who had spent the greater part of his life in the French capital and been on terms of great intimacy with all personages who had a hand in moulding French affairs from the days. of Charles X. until the downfall of the Second Empire and the Commune. According to the book, the narrator had for years rubbed elbows with everything that was worth while in French literature, art, drama, music, society, and politics. Men like Thiers, Rouher, Blanc, Balzac, the elder Dumas, Eugène Sue, Alfred de Musset, Béranger, David, Berlioz, Horace Vernet, Delacroix, and women like George Sand, and Rachel, and Madame de Girardin, he had known well, and of each he had a dozen curious anecdotes to tell. It was a brilliant book -a very brilliant book-and summing it up at first astute critics came to the conclusion that the Englishman in Paris. could be no other than the famous Sir Richard Wallace, an illegitimate son of the Marquis of Hertford, that nobleman who was known all over Europe as a grand seigneur and an accomplished libertine, and who served as the model from which Thackeray drew the portrait of Lord Steyne of Vanity Fair and Pendennis. After a time, however, it began to dawn upon the people that An Englishman in Paris was perhaps a little too good to be real. Sir Richard Wallace's life in Paris had been such as to have enabled him to know well almost all the great people intimately described in the work, but Chance could hardly have been generous enough to have seen that he would be always just round the corner whenever any unexpected important event took place. The Englishman in Paris was forever meeting just the right people at the right moment. If he strolled up a side street he was sure to encounter the elder Dumas, for instance, if people happened to be interested in Dumas at that particular moment, and old Alexandre always made for him some particularly appropriate bon mot or epigram. In fact, after a second reading of the book and a careful consideration of all its details, people began to grow a trifle suspicious, and this suspicion grew until at last it became known that the whole production was nothing but a gigantic "fake" and that many of the events described in the book had taken place years before the author was born. Instead of being the suspected Sir Richard Wallace, the man who wrote An |