It has to be said that most of Minor’s quotations for this particular word came from a somewhat obvious source: Sir Joshua Reynolds’s famous Discourses, written in 1769, the year after he became president of the Royal Academy. But they were of inestimable value to the dictionary makers—and as proof, there today, standing as a mute memorial to the beginnings of his work, is the first known quotation that William Chester Minor had placed in the finished book.
