an Heroic Epistle in Latin, and in the summer vacation, when he retired to Stoke, sent his "Ode to Spring" to West; but this letter did not arrive in Hertfordshire till after the death of his beloved friend. West died soon after his Letter to Gray which concludes-Vale et vive paulisper cum vivis; "so little, says Mason, was this amiable youth then aware of the short time that he himself would be numbered among the living.

I shall here insert a very judicious criticism by the late Lord Grenville, on Johnson's censure of the expression, in the "Ode to Spring," of honied spring;' particularly as the Book in which it appeared was only privately printed, and consequently is known but to a few readers :† "There has of late arisen, says Johnson in the 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 am 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 Milton. But to say nothing of the general principles of all languages, 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 tongue, derived to it from its

* West resided at Pope's, near Hatfield, and was buried in the chancel of Hatfield Church. He died June 4th, 1742, in the 26th year of his age. His poems have never been fully collected. I find among Gray's Manuscript Papers a list of them, made out I think in Mason's writing; and there is another among the MSS. at Pembroke College. See in a Note to the Life of Gray in the Ald. Ed. Vol. I. p. xvi. an account of them more complete than any previous one. Mr. Chalmers omitted his name entirely in his Edition of the British Poets. The four concluding lines of the Sonnet on the Death of West are as tender and elegant in expression as the opening quatrain appears to me defective :

"The fields to all their wonted tribute bear;
"To warm their little loves the birds complain :
"I fruitless mourn to him, that cannot hear;
"And weep the more, because I weep in vain."

† See Lord Grenville's Nuga Metricæ, 4to.

Saxon origin, and a main source of its energy and richness? First-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 sing, 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 participle similarly formed, though strongly distorted in its use to express menacing, almost the opposite of its original.

66

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, slipper'd, 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 found and used in strict conformity with the genius of our language. Sugared is an epithet frequent in our ancient poetry, and its use was probably anterior to that of the verb, of which it now appears to be a participle; but that verb has since been fully adopted in

our language. We now sugar our cups, as formerly our ancestors spiced and drugged them; and no reason can be assigned, why, if such was our practice, we might not also honey them, with equal propriety of speech.

4thly. On the same analogy, we form another 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, openhearted, short-sighted, good-natured, and the like. In Poetry we trace them from the well-envyned frankelein of Chaucer, through the most brilliant pages of all his successors, to the present hour. What readers of Shakspeare and Milton need to be reminded of even-handed, high-flighted, trumpet-tongued; or of full-voiced, floweryknitted, and fiery-wheeled? All these expressions, and beautiful combinations, Johnson's canon would banish from our language. The 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 seems only to betray the vile passions,* which in a very powerful and well-intentioned, but a very ill-regulated mind, the success of a contemporary had been permitted to excite. The true spirit indeed of this criticism appears with no less force in what almost immediately follows, when Johnson attempts

* Compare the following passage from another writer on the same person and subject: "To myself, much as I admire his great and various merits, both as a critic and a writer, human nature never appears in a more humiliating form, than when I read his "Lives of the Poets," a performance which exhibits a more faithful, expressive, and curious picture of the author, than all the portraits attempted by his biographer; and which, in this point of view, compensates fully, by the moral lesson it may suggest, for the critical errors which it sanctions. The errors alas! are not such as any one who has perused his imitations of Juvenal can place to the account of a bad taste, but such as had their root in weaknesses, which a noble mind would be still more unwilling to acknowledge." See D. Stewart's Philosophical Essays, 4to. p. 491.

to ridicule a passage, which few other men have read without delight,-Gray's beautiful invocation of the Thames in the "Ode on Eton College;"Say Father Thames,' &c. "This is useless, he says, and puerile: Father Thames had no better means of knowing, than he himself!" He forgets his own address to the Nile, in Rasselas, for a purpose very similar; and he expects his readers to forget one of the most affecting passages in Virgil. Father Thames might well know as much of the sports of boys, as the great Father of Waters knew of the discontents of men, or the Tiber itself of the designs of Marcellus."

I would not violate that reverence due to so great a man as Dr. Johnson; but I must believe that very undeniable prejudice existed in his mind with regard to Gray, though how it arose I am at a loss to say. "Sir, he is a dull man," he said to a friend, " in every way: he is dull in writing, and dull in conception." All that I shall say to this extraordinary assertion is, that the public voice has acquitted the poet of dulness, for no quality is less easily pardoned; and as to his Letters, they abound in humour more than those of any other writer in this country. I speak of his original and authentic correspondence, of which I have had the opportunity of seeing nearly the whole that exists; for Mason has in fact, with a timid and most unnecessary circumspection, omitted much of the wit and humour, as he himself owns, because of their personalities, or some other local circumstances, they did not seem so well adapted to hit the public taste."

In the autumn of 1742 Gray composed "The Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College;"* "The Hymn to

* The Ode on Eton College was first published in folio, in 1747, and appeared again in Dodsley's Collection, Vol. II. p. 267, in which the name of the author of the Hymn to

b

Adversity;" and the "Elegy in a Country Church-yard" was also commenced. We have heard the expression in the twelfth line of the first Ode,

"Ah fields belov'd in vain,"

considered as obscure, and not easily interpreted; but the Poem is written in the character of one who contemplates this life as a scene of misfortune and sorrow,

̓́Ανθρωπος ἱκανὴ προφάσις εἰς τὸ δυστύχειν,

from whose fatal power the brief sunshine of youth is supposed to be exempt. The fields are "beloved" as the scene of youthful pleasures, and as affording the promise of happiness to come; but this promise never was fulfilled. Fate, which dooms man to misery, soon over-clouded these opening prospects of delight. That is in vain beloved, which does not realize the expectations it held out. No fruit, but that of disappointment, has followed the blossoms of a thoughtless hope. The happiness of youth must be pronounced imperfect, when not succeeded by the prosperity of future life, which, according to the poet, Fate has decreed to man. For this "youthful progeny is described as sporting on the brink of misery. The "murderous band," the ministers of misfortune, are already in ambush to seize their little victims; but a little period now of thoughtless joy is allowed to them, and then they will become a prey to those passions which are the vultures that tear the mind, and those diseases which are the painful family of death. The fields therefore, which are the brief abode of youthful sports, are “in vain beloved," as having promised happiness, which from the very nature of man, and the tenure by which he

Adversity first appeared, Dodsley, Vol. IV. together with the Elegy, and not, as Mason says, with the three foregoing Odes, which are printed in the second volume. In Mason's selection the Hymn is called an Ode, but the title Hymn is given by the author. The motto from Æschylus is not in Dodsley. The "Ode on Spring" appeared in Dodsley's Collection, Vol. II. p. 27, under the simple title of Ode. Dr. Joseph Warton informs us, that little or no notice was taken of this Ode on Eton College on its first appearance.