ppl. a. [f. LABOUR v. + -ED1.]
1. † Cultivated, tilled, plowed (obs.); also, of a mine, worked.
1579. Spenser, Sheph. Cal., Oct., 58. Whereon he earst had taught his flocks to feede, And laboured lands to yield the timely eare.
1697. Dryden, Virg. Georg., II. 414. Root up wild Olives from thy labour’d Lands.
1833. Tennyson, Œnone 113. Or labour’d mine undrainable of ore.
† 2. Employed in labor; hard worked; oppressed with labor or toil. Obs.
1595. Shaks., John, II. i. 232. Your King, whose labour’d spirits Fore-wearied in this action of swift speede.
1634. Milton, Comus, 291. What time the labour’d Oxe In his loose traces from the furrow came.
1682. Dryden, Dk. Guise, I. 1. Turn’d out, like labour’d Oxen, after Harvest.
† b. Worn with use. Obs.
1535. Coverdale, 1 Sam. xiii. 21. The edges of the plowshares, and mattockes, & forckes, and axes were laboured, and the poyntes blont.
3. Wrought, produced or accomplished with labor; highly elaborated; hence in depreciatory sense, performed or accomplished only by the expenditure of excessive toil or tedious elaboration, and consequently showing indications of heaviness or want of spontaneity. Also, of physical action: Heavy, performed with great effort.
1608. Shaks., Per., II. iii. 17. In framing an Artist, art hath thus decreed, To make some good, but others to exceed, And you are her labourd scholler.
a. 1658. Cleveland, Elegy B. Jonson, 65. The marbled Glory of thy labour’d Rhyme.
1703. Pope, Thebais, 202. Labour’d columns in long order plac’d.
1740. Pitt, Æneid, X. 759. High in my Dome, are Silver Talents roll’d With Piles of Labour’d and Unlabour’d Gold.
1756. Burke, Subl. & B., V. v. There is not perhaps in the whole Eneid a more grand and laboured passage than the description of Vulcan’s cavern in Etna.
1826. J. Foster, in Life & Corr. (1846), II. 84. Other writing of a laboured and tedious kind.
1856. Olmsted, Slave States, 215. A labored investigation of evidence.
1875. Jowett, Plato (ed. 2), V. 15. The dialogue is generally weak and laboured.
1897. Mary Kingsley, W. Africa, 156. The laboured beat of the engines.
1898. G. Meredith, Odes Fr. Hist., 72. Laboured mounds, that a foot or a wanton stick may subvert.
