Buskined

ppl. a. [f. BUSKIN sb. + -ED².]

  1.  Shod or covered with buskins.

1590.  Shaks., Mids. N., II. i. 71. The bouncing Amazon Your buskin’d Mistresse.

1704.  Pope, Windsor For., 168. Her buskin’d Virgins.

1877.  Mrs. Oliphant, Makers Flor., iv. 104. A brown peasant boy of ten, with buskined legs.

  2.  spec. Wearing the buskins of tragedy; fig. and transf., concerned with or belonging to tragedy.

1626.  Massinger, Rom. Actor, I. i. The Greeks, to whom we owe the first invention Both of the buskined scene & humble sock.

1742.  Young, Nt. Th., VI. 349. See the buskin’d chief Unshod … Reduc’d to his own Stature.

1820.  Hazlitt, Lect. Dram. Lit., 135. They would be ranted on the stage by some buskined hero or tragedy queen.

  b.  Tragic; dignified, elevated, lofty.

1595.  Markham, Sir R. Grinuile, lxxi. Rich buskin’d Seneca.

1632.  Brome, Court Begg., III. i. Wks. 1873, I. 220. Petra[r]k’s buskin’d stile.

a. 1771.  Gray, Poems (1775), 35. In buskin’d measures move Pale Grief, and pleasing Pain.

1838–9.  Hallam, Hist. Lit., III. III. vi. § 98. The interest serious, but not always of buskined dignity.

1841.  De Quincey, Homer & H., Wks. VI. 393. To speak in a sort of stilted, or at least buskined language.