masterly strokes."*

The language resembles

rather that of Rowe or Addison, than of Shakespeare; though it is more highly wrought, and more closely compacted. If finished, it would, I think, have delighted the scholar in the closet; but it is too descriptive to have pleased upon the stage. Βαστάζονται δὲ οἱ ἀναγνωστικοί.... Kai παραβαλλόμενοι, οἱ μὲν τῶν γραφικῶν, ἐν τοῖς ἀγῶσι στενοὶ φαίνονται.†

Gray now employed himself in the perusal of the ancient authors. He mentions that he was reading Thucydides, Theocritus, and Anacreon. He translated some parts of Propertius with great elegance of language and versification, and selected for his Italian studies the poetry of Petrarch. He wrote an Heroic Epistle in Latin, in imitation of the manner of Ovid; and a Greek Epigram, which he communicated to West: to whom also in the summer, when he retired to his family at Stoke, he sent

*I have said that Gray kept an attentive eye upon Racine during the composition of his tragedy; an assertion, I think, that the notes will serve to prove: but the learned Mr. Twining, in his notes on Aristotle's Poetics, (p. 385, 4to.) says: "I have often wondered what it was that could attach Mr. Gray so strongly to a poet whose genius was so little analogous to his own. I must confess I cannot, even in the Dramatic Fragment given us by Mr. Mason, discover any other resemblance to Racine, than in the length of the speeches. The fault, indeed, is Racine's; its beauties are surely of a higher order," &c.

† Aristotelis Rhetorica, lib. y. cap. xii.

his 'Ode to Spring,' which was written there, but which did not arrive in Hertfordshire till after the death of his beloved friend.* West died only twenty days after he had written the Letter to Gray, which concludes with " Vale, et vive paulisper cum vivis." So little (says Mr. Mason) was the amiable youth then aware of the short time that he himself would be numbered amongst the living.

I shall here insert a very correct and judicious criticism, on a censure made by Johnson of an expression in Gray's Ode to Spring, by the late

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*West was buried in the chancel of Hatfield church, beneath a stone, with the following epitaph: "Here lieth the body of Richard West, esq. only son of the right honourable Richard West, esq. lord chancellor of Ireland, who died the 1st of June, 1742, in the 26th year of his age." West's poems have never been fully collected. There is one, An Ode to Mary Magdalene,' in Walpole's Works, vol. iv. p. 419: another in Dalrymple's Songs, p. 142. In the European Magazine for January, 1798, p. 45, is a poem said to be written by him, called 'Damon to Philomel; ' and a Copy of Verses on his Death, supposed to be written by his uncle, Judge Burnet. In Walpole's Works, vol. i. p. 204, is a well known Epigram which was written by West, Time and Thomas Hearne,' which was printed by Mr. Walpole in a paper intended for the World,' but not sent, and which is commonly attributed to Swift. It appears also, that part of the tragedy of Pausanias is extant in MS. See the editor's note in Walpole's Works, vol. iv. p. 458; also his translation of Tibullus. See Mason's Gray, vol. i. p. 22. The collection of his poems by Dr. Anderson, in the edition of the British Poets, is very incomplete: and Mr. Alexander Chalmers, in his subsequent edition, has omitted them entirely.

Lord Grenville, a criticism which does credit to his Lordship's learning and taste.*

"There has of late arisen,' says Johnson, in his Life of Gray, 'a practice of giving to adjectives derived from substantives, the termination of participles such as the cultured plain, the daisied bank; but I was sorry to see in the lines of a scholar like Gray, the honied spring.'

"A scholar, like Johnson, might have remembered that mellitus is used by Catullus, Cicero, and Horace, and that honied itself is found both in Shakspeare and in Milton. But to say nothing of the general principles of all language, how could the writer of an English Dictionary be ignorant that the ready conversion of our substantives into verbs, participles, and participial adjectives, is of the very essence of our own tongue, derived to it from its Saxon origin, and a main source of its energy and richness?

"1st. In the instances of verbs and participles, this is too obvious to be dwelt upon for a moment. Such verbs as to plough, to witness, to pity, to ornament, together with the participles regularly formed from them are among the commonest words in our language. Shakspeare, in a ludicrous but expressive phrase, has converted even a proper name into a participle of this description: 'Petruchio,' he says, 'is kated.' The epithet of a hectoring fellow is a more familiar instance of a

* See Nugæ Metrica, by Lord Grenville, privately printed.

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participle similarly formed, though strangely distorted in its use to express a meaning almost the opposite of its original.

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2ndly. These participles of verbs thus derived, like all other participles, when used to denote habitual attributes, pass into adjectives. Winged, feathered, thatched, painted, and innumerable others are indiscriminately used in both these forms, according to the construction of the sentence, and its context. And the transition is so easy, that in many passages it may be doubted to which of these two parts of speech such words should properly be referred.

"3rdly. Between these participial adjectives, and those which Johnson condemns, there is the closest analogy. Both are derived from substantives; and both have the termination of participles. The latter, such words for instance, as honied, daisied, tapestried, slippered, and the like, differ from the others only in not being referable to any yet established verb; but so little material is the difference, that there is hardly one of these cases, in which the corresponding verb might not, if it were wanted, be formed and used, in strict conformity with the genius of our language. Sugard is an epithet frequent in our ancient poetry, and its use was properly long anterior to that of the verb, of which it now appears to be a participle. But that verb has since been fully adopted into our language. We now sugar our cups, as

freely as our ancestors spiced and drugged them, and no reason can be assigned, why, if such were our practice, we might not also honey them, with equal propriety of speech.

"4thly. On the same analogy we form another very numerous and very valuable class of adjectives, compound epithets, derived like the others, from substantives, and like them terminating as participles, but having prefixed to them the signification of some additional attribute. Such are in common speech, four-footed, open-hearted, shortsighted, good-natured, and the like. In poetry we trace them from the well-envyned franklin of Chaucer, through the most brilliant pages of all his successors to the present hour. What reader of Shakspeare or Milton needs to be reminded of even-handed, high-flighted, and trumpet-tongued, or of full-voiced, flowery-kirtled, and fiery-wheeled? All these expressive and beautiful combinations, Johnson's canon would banish from our language.

"His criticism therefore recoils on himself. The poet has followed the usage of his native tongue, and the example of its best masters. The grammarian appears unacquainted both with its practice and its principles. The censure serves only to betray the evil passions, which in a very powerful and well-intentioned, but very ill-regulated mind, the success of a contemporary had been permitted to excite.

"The true spirit indeed of this criticism appears