ECCO Part II, a new version of Eighteenth Century Collections Online was released earlier this year. It has everything that was in ECCO, plus nearly fifty thousand additional titles and a new interface. One of the great additions for this group for instance is the two volumes of the first edition (1755) of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (in folio). This all sounds great, but it seems that not everything is improved.

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Link: http://www.nhlbisupport.com/bmi/

Boswell's entry in the ODNB reads that he "stood about 5 feet 6 inches tall, and his weight at 1776 was recorded as 11 stone 12lbs". He was 36 at the time, and his BMI (Body Mass Index) ...

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While I was looking at the use of the subjunctive in letters by Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestly for a paper for the conference Patriotism(e) & Prescriptivism(e) in Toronto, this August, I came across the following. In the second edition of his Rudiments of English Grammar Priestley discusses the decline of the subjunctive in favour of the indicative:

This conjunctive form of verbs, though our forefathers paid a pretty strict regard to it, is much neglected by many of our best writers […] So little is this form of verbs attended to, that few writers are quite uniform in their own practice with respect to it. We even, sometimes, find both the forms of a verb in the same sentence, and in the same construction (Priestley 1768: 119-120)

I found precisely this in one of Benjamin Franklin’s letters, where he uses both the indicative and the inflectional subjunctive forms with two verbs which refer to the same subject, combined by a coordinating conjunction.

Mr. Joseph Crellius is gone to Holland and I suppose may call at London before he returns, and settle his Daughter’s Affair [emphasis mine] (letter to William Strahan, 6 December 1750 – American Philosophical Society)

Was Franklin really confused here? Or, as this is the only instance of this I have found, is it a transcription error? The letter is available on the website The Papers of Benjamin Franklin

 

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/27/ruth-padel-smear-email

The poet Ruth Padel, who resigned as Professor of Poetry in Oxford after only nine days, was preceded in this chair by Robert Lowth. Lowth was Professor of Poetry in Oxford from 1741 to 1751. The lectures he delivered there were published as De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum Praelectiones Academiai in 1753, and he was subsequently awarded his doctorate from the University of Oxford a year later.

Christine Erkelens, one of this year's Pre-University students who took a course in the context of the Codifiers project, won the Jan Kijne prize for the best final paper. Her paper, called "Reconstructing Social Networks: Comparing the Wills of Mrs Thrale and her daughter" and supervised by Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, was nominated along with ten other papers on a wide variety of topics within fields taught in this university. The final nomination as the best paper was unanimous. Warmest congratulations from the Codifiers project, Christine!