BY ERIC PARTRIDGE

MANY YEARS ago I coined an epigram which has, often de-
faced, been coming back to me ever since, usually as "of
unknown origin." It goes: The world contains far too many
people who have nothing to say--and persist in saying it. That is a
charge which nobody will ever be able to make against DICTIONARY
OF THE ARTS.

Yet I have a very grave charge to make. Against myself, for having
failed to think of the idea. This is decidedly a book I shall constantly
use in my lexicographical and other philological work. Still, I shouldn't,
after all, complain, for I have providentially been spared the trouble
of inciting some publisher to gather a team of experts and of urging
him to get on with the job before some other fellow beat him to it.
Instead of writing this introduction--an introduction similar to one
that I should endeavor to write for some dear friend and, incidentally,
extremely able man at his profession or his trade--I should be writing
to the Philosophical Library and thanking them for performing a
memorable public service and for doing me, personally, such a good
turn.

To employ an idiom popularized by Mr. Evelyn Waugh, I feel that
there is something "blush-making" in my writing at all about DIC-
TIONARY OF THE ARTS. Don't get me wrong! Although adult and indeed
mature, this dictionary contains nothing that would bring a blush to
the most maidenly cheek (Où sont les joues d'antan?); yet one hesi-
tates to write intimately about a happy marriage. That is what we have
here. A marriage, consummated and fruitful, between imagination and
scholarship.

Since, as the old proverb has it, "there goes more to marriage than
four bare legs in a bed," and since what causes marriage to endure is
neither passion nor ecstasy but friendship and sympathy, I should like

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