"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 am sorry to see in the lines of a scholar like Gray the _honied_ spring." But, as we have seen, _honied_ is found in Milton; and Shakespeare also uses it in _Hen. V._ i. 1: "honey'd sentences." _Mellitus_ is used by Cicero, Horace, and Catullus. The editor of an English dictionary, as Lord Grenville has remarked, ought to know "that the ready conversion of our substances into verbs, participles, and participial adjectives is of the very essence of our tongue, derived from its Saxon origin, and a main source of its energy and richness." 27. _The liquid noon_. Gray quotes Virgil, _Geo._ iv. 59: "Nare per aestatem liquidam." 30. _Quick-glancing to the sun_. Gray quotes Milton, _P. L._ vii. 405: "Sporting with quick glance, Show to the sun their waved coats dropt with gold." 31. Gray here quotes Green, _Grotto_: "While insects from the threshold preach." In a letter to Walpole, he says: "I send you a bit of a thing for two reasons: first, because it is of one of your favourites, Mr. M. Green; and next, because I would do justice. The thought on which my second Ode turns [this Ode, afterwards placed first by Gray] is manifestly stole from hence; not that I knew it at the time, but having seen this many years before, to be sure it imprinted itself on my memory, and, forgetting the Author, I took it for my own." Then comes the quotation from Green's _Grotto_. The passage referring to the insects is as follows: "To the mind's ear, and inward sight, There silence speaks, and shade gives light: While insects from the threshold preach, And minds dispos'd to musing teach; Proud of strong limbs and painted hues, They perish by the slightest bruise; Or maladies begun within Destroy more slow life's frail machine: From maggot-youth, thro' change of state, They feel like us the turns of fate: Some born to creep have liv'd to fly, And chang'd earth's cells for dwellings high: And some that did their six wings keep, Before they died, been forc'd to creep. They politics, like ours, profess; The greater prey upon the less. Some strain on foot huge loads to bring, Some toil incessant on the wing: Nor from their vigorous schemes desist Till death; and then they are never mist. Some frolick, toil, marry, increase, Are sick and well, have war and peace; And broke with age in half a day, Yield to successors, and away." 47. _Painted plumage_. Cf. Pope, _Windsor Forest_, 118: "His painted wings; and Milton, _P. L._ vii. 433: "From branch to branch the smaller birds with song Solaced the woods, and spread their painted wings." See also Virgil, _Geo._ iii. 243, and _Æn._ iv. 525: "pictaeque volucres;" and Phædrus, _Fab._ iii. 18: "pictisque plumis."