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Lord Grenville, a criticism which does credit to his Lordship's learning and taste.^[1]

"'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