bereft, built, dealt, dug, dreamt, hung, and knit.  The former prefers creeped to crept, and freezed to froze; the latter, slitted to slit, wringed to wrung; and both consider, “I bended,” “I bursted” and “I blowed,” to be good modern English.  W. Allen acknowledges freezed and slided; and, like Webster, prefers hove to hoven:  but the latter justly prefers heaved to both.  EXAMP.:  “The supple kinsman slided to the helm.”—­New Timon.  “The rogues slided me into the river.”—­Shak.  “And the sand slided from beneath my feet.”—­ DR. JOHNSON:  in Murray’s Sequel, p. 179.  “Wherewith she freez’d her foes to congeal’d stone.”—­Milton’s Comus, l. 449.  “It freezed hard last night.  Now, what was it that freezed so hard?”—­Emmons’s Gram., p. 25.  “Far hence lies, ever freez’d, the northern main.”—­Savage’s Wanderer, l. 57.  “Has he not taught, beseeched, and shed abroad the Spirit unconfined?”—­Pollok’s Course of Time, B. x, l. 275.

OBS. 6.—­D.  Blair supposes catched to be an “erroneous” word and unauthorized:  “I catch’d it,” for “I caught it,” he sets down for a “vulgarism.”—­E.  Gram., p. 111.  But catched is used by some of the most celebrated authors.  Dearborn prefers the regular form of creep:  “creep, creeped or crept, creeped or crept.”—­Columbian Gram., p. 38.  I adopt no man’s opinions implicitly; copy nothing without examination; but, to prove all my decisions to be right, would be an endless task.  I shall do as much as ought to be expected, toward showing that they are so.  It is to be remembered, that the poets, as well as the vulgar, use some forms which a gentleman would be likely to avoid, unless he meant to quote or imitate; as,

“So clomb the first grand thief into God’s fold;
So since into his church lewd hirelings climb.”
—­Milton, P. L., B. iv, l. 192.

“He shore his sheep, and, having packed the wool,
Sent them unguarded to the hill of wolves.”
—­Pollok, C. of T., B. vi, l. 306.

------“The King of heav’n
Bar’d his red arm, and launching from the sky
His writhen bolt, not shaking empty smoke,
Down to the deep abyss the flaming felon strook.”
—­Dryden.

OBS. 7.—­The following are examples in proof of some of the forms acknowledged below:  “Where etiquette and precedence abided far away.”—­Paulding’s Westward-Ho! p. 6.  “But there were no secrets where Mrs. Judith Paddock abided.”—­Ib., p. 8.  “They abided by the forms of government established by the charters.”—­John Quincy Adams, Oration, 1831.  “I have abode consequences often enough in the course