Although green seems to have been their popular colour, yet the fairies of the moon were often clad in heath-brown or lichen-dyed garments, whence the epithet of "Elfin-grey."

The epithet 'lorn' may also be noted in the same connexion; as Keats's Ode terminates with a celebrated passage in which 'forlorn' is the leading word (but not as an epithet for the nightingale itself) 'Forlorn!the very word is as a knell,' &c. The nightingale is also introduced into the Elegy of Moschus for Bion; 'Ye nightingales that lament,' &c. (p. 65), and 'Nor ever sang so sweet the nightingale on the cliffs.'

I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures.

As Arthur Helps says, men use several epithets in the hope that one of them may fit.

I have not your faculty of mingling endearing epithets with sharp accusations and reproaches.

I do not feel satisfied that this is true at all; at any rate it seems to me probable that Shelley, who constantly called himself an atheist in after-life, received the epithet at Eton for some cause more apposite than disaffection to school-authority.

Besides such epithets as hayseed and clodhopper, contemptuous in their very origin, villain (farm servant), churl (farm laborer), and boor (peasant) have all gathered unto themselves opprobrium; villain now involves a scoundrelly spirit, churl a contumelious manner, boor a bumptious ill-breeding; not one of these words is any longer confined in its application to a particular social rank.

On one occasion he denounced the small boroughs as "the rotten part of the constitution," thus originating the epithet by which they in time came to be generally described; but more usually he disavowed all idea of disfranchising them, propounding rather a scheme for diminishing their importance by a large addition to the county members.

He kept the mud on his uniform and the epithet on his cheek.

The diminutive Epithets of Vagula, Blandula, and the rest, appear not to me as Expressions of Levity, but rather of Endearment and Concern; such as we find in Catullus, and the Authors of Hendeca-syllabi after him, where they are used to express the utmost Love and Tenderness for their MistressesIf you think me right in my Notion of the last Words of Adrian, be pleased to insert this in the Spectator; if not, to suppress it.'

One third of the public papers are crammed with what is called Theatrical Critique; but is in fact either the barefaced puff direct in favour of one theatre, or a string of abusive epithets against the other, equally void of truth and decency.

For this Reason we find the Poets, who are always addressing themselves to the Imagination, borrowing more of their Epithets from Colours than from any other Topic.

But he was carried along by his own words, and sought always a stronger epithet than that which he had used.

She says you must write more showable letters about these matters, for, with all our trouble of crossing out this word, and giving a cleaner turn to th' other, and folding down at this part, and squeezing an obnoxious epithet into a corner, she can hardly communicate their contents without offence.

There is high Homeric precedent for keeping fast hold of an epithet under all changes of circumstance, and so the precocious author of the 'Comparative Estimate' heard the echoes repeating "Young Ganymede" when an illiterate beholder at a railway station would have given him forty years at least.

In fine, I have satisfied myself that there is such a thing as that which tourists call romantic, which I very much suspected before; they make such a spluttering about it, and toss their splendid epithets around them, till they give as dim a light as at four o'clock next morning the lamps do after an illumination.

Samarendra merely laughed aloud and hurled mocking epithets after his retreating figure, to which no reply was vouchsafed.