The Chambers occupies a strange place in the landscape of contemporary lexicography. I have just spent five weeks with it, reading straight through from A ("the first letter of the modern English alphabet as in the Roman") to zythum ("a kind of beer made by the ancient Egyptians, highly commended by Diodurus Siculus, a writer of 1BC") during my morning and evening commutes and at the office while waiting for reporters to file. The latest Chambers is 1,936 pages long and, at just over five pounds, not unmanageably heavy. I think of these remarkable brothers-one the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, the other the anonymous author of the dotty but influential Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation-with their indefatigable Scottish industry and lightly borne erudition whenever I open The Chambers Dictionary, which has just appeared in its 13th edition. New breeds have of late been introduced from China and Japan, interesting from their peculiar appearance, gentleness, and docility, with extremely short puggish muzzle the Chinese breed very small with smooth hair the Japanese rather larger, with an exuberance of long soft hair and a very bushy tail. The common English Pug is usually yellowish with a black snout, the tail firmly curled over the back. They are often very affectionate and good-natured, bearing without resentment the roughest handling to which children can subject them. The disposition is, however, extremely unlike that of the bull-dog, being characterized by great timidity and gentleness. PUG or PUG-DOG, a kind of dog much like the bull-dog in form, and in particular, in its much abbreviated muzzle. Those who, like me, wasted their golden youth among the broken links and aseptic prose of Wikipedia will appreciate the breezy meticulousness of the original ten-volume Chambers’s Encyclopædia, which can be bought online now for a song: William and Robert Chambers, sons of a hand weaver driven out of business by the power loom, became prosperous publishers, churning out Scott-related minutiae, antiquarian and bibliographical works, travel guides, primers, anthologies, collections of jokes, a monumental Life and Works of Robert Burns in four volumes, Notices of the Most Remarkable Fires Which Have Occurred in Edinburgh, Popular Rhymes of Scotland, A History of the Rebellion of 1745, and, of course, their eponymous Encyclopædia and Dictionary. "What the gift of a whole toy-shop would have been to most children," he wrote in his memoirs of dipping into them for the first time, "this book was to me. Shuffling around in their attic, the elder of the two found an ancient set of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
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