Noah Webster

Noah Webster is a book by Horace Elisha Scudder. The contents list names chapters called The Grammatical Institute, Preparations for the Dictionary, and An American Dictionary of the English Language. The text says the life of the household in a Connecticut village in the middle of the eighteenth century was very self-centred.

The text adds that the agricultural life, which was more productive in the valley of the Connecticut than elsewhere, determined largely the social life of the colony and made Connecticut the most serenely democratic of the New England States. The text quotes a passage in which the Prompter's purpose is doing as much good as possible by making men wiser and better, and in which a determination is reached to have nothing to do with a brilliant flow of words, a pompous elegance of diction. The text also says that the Americanism of Hawthorne, for example, differs from that of Webster in quality rather than in essence.