So the shade that the hawthorn gives the shepherd, its thorns, its green buds are mentioned, but never 'the May.'

Nor does he ever mention the furze except as prickly: nor the broom except as a besom, yet nearly every poet before him. had a word of admiration for these most lovely flowers, as fragrant as they are lovely. Why not Shakespeare? Heather again-he never mentions it, except in the passage: 'Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground, ling, heath, brown furze, anything.' Poppies again—he never mentions them, except as opium in the lines, 'not poppy, nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world.'

are more.

Are not these surprises enough, for the lover of Nature, who should go abroad for a country walk with Shakespeare? There Shakespeare never mentions the bluebell. Once he says 'the azure harebell, like thy veins;' but why should we go and say that when Shakespeare said 'harebell' he meant 'bluebell'? None of his contemporaries went about to misname the common bluebell, the wild hyacinth, and why should Shakespeare? Besides, 'azured harebell, like thy veins' applies just as appropriately to the one flower as to the other. As a matter of fact the phrase was a common poetical fancy, and 'blue-veined' was a regular epithet for the violet long before Shakespeare used it.

But there are some wrong-headed and unreasonable admirers of Shakespeare who will not readily allow that the poet does not mention such pretty, familiar flowers as our English bluebells. I have already shown that he does not even mention 'May,' and a score of other pretty and familiar objects of the country, and the bluebell is only one more on the list. He never mentions the bluebell.

Ben Jonson does. For instance, in a long catalogue of flowers he has

'Blue harebells, paigles, pansies, calaminth,
Flower-gentle and the fair-hair'd hyacinth!

Nor does Shakespeare mention the ox-eye or Michaelmas daisy.
Ben Jonson does.

'Fair ox-eye, goldy-locks, and columbine.'

And let me say here, lest I should be misunderstood, that I do not quote Ben Jonson or any other writer, with any idea of implying his superiority to Shakespeare for what he does or does not mention. I quote only to show that there was no reason why

Shakespeare should not have referred to flowers which his contemporaries refer to; at any rate, no such reason as that the flowers in question were 'then known as something else,' or 'probably not then familiarly known '-two arguments in defence of Shakespeare's omissions which foolish champions are perpetually adducing.

Shakespeare never needs defence nor champions. On the other hand, there is no disrespect implied in honestly examining the methods, often incomprehensible, by which he worked.

There remain of my list, the dog-rose, the buttercup, daisy, and cowslip. Does Shakespeare ever mention the dog-rose? I think not. Some 'critics' aver that when the poet says 'canker-blooms,' he means dog-roses, in which case he only mentions this lovely flower to insult it. So I prefer to believe that he never mentions it at all, for I should be sorry to think that Shakespeare despised the dog-rose and thought ill of it. Moreover, I am convinced, in spite of' critics,' that when the poet said 'canker-bloom,' he meant what he said, 'cankerbloom,' and nothing else. However, there is no allusion in Shakespeare to the wild hedge-rose, one of the glories of English lanes, the pride of our English woodlands, and a universal delight to young and old alike.

Buttercups? Does Shakespeare mention buttercups? In Love's Labour's Lost is a cuckoo-song (perhaps not Shakespeare's)

that opens

'When daisies pied and violets blue,

And lady-smocks all silver white,

And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue,

Do paint the meadows with delight.'

And in King Lear occurs the line

Burdock, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers.'

In these two passages, or nowhere, Shakespeare alludes to the 'buttercup.' The latter name is apparently post-Shakespearean; at any rate, I have not come across it in Elizabethan literature, and the flower used to be known in the poet's day as kingcup or gold-cup-both of which names are in common use in England to-day-and also, as some authors say, 'cuckoobuds,' but without ever giving any authority for their statement. Their only authority, I suspect, is that Shakespeare speaks of 'cuckoo-buds of yellow hue' and that they presume he meant buttercups. On the other hand, writers give us a choice

between celandine and cowslip. Ben Jonson speaks of 'kingcups.' He therefore undoubtedly meant our buttercups. If any one can produce an example of cuckoo-bud as meaning buttercup, why then, Shakespeare also speaks of buttercups. But until then, all we can say is, that when Shakespeare said 'cuckoo-buds of yellow hue,' he meant a yellow flower, but which yellow flower he meant we cannot tell. As for his 'cuckoo-flowers,' there is no obvious connection between them and cuckoo-buds. For the 'cuckoo-flower' in Shakepeare's day was the ragged robin, and when he says 'cuckooflower,' why, in the name of all that is common-sensible, should we not suppose he meant cuckoo-flower? As it is, critics argue that his cuckoo-flower means buttercups, because his cuckoobud was 'of yellow hue,' which appears to me to partake of the nature of nonsense.

Out of my list there remain, then, only the daisy and the cowslip. About these there can be no doubt whatever. 'Pied' sounds a curious epithet for the daisy, but in Elizabethan English, it meant 'of more than one colour,' but always with a sense of gaiety in the colouring. The combination of white, pink, and yellow in the daisy made it therefore pied. When the brothers were going to bury Imogen, one says, 'Let us find out the prettiest daisied plot we can, and make him a grave;' an exquisite little touch, spoken as it is by a man brought up amid such rough surroundings, and in a semi-savage cave-life. Again, in Lucrece we have the charming line

'Without the bed her other fair hand was

On the green coverlet, whose perfect white
Show'd like an April daisy on the grass.'

Of Shakespeare's admiration of daisies there can be no suspicion. Nor as to cowslips. Indeed, so exceptional is his treatment of the flower, so unlike him that detail of personal observation, 'the crimson drops in the bottom of a cowslip,' that I am always afraid, lest I shall come upon the original in some preceding writer, and find that it is not Shakespeare's after all. But I am as often reassured when I read the lines, for surely no one but Shakespeare could have thought them or written them exactly as he has done

'The cowslips tall her pensioners be,

In their gold coats spots you see.
Those be rubies, fairy favours,
In those freckles live their savours.'

1

The allusion to Queen Elizabeth's stalwart 'pensioners' in their
crimson and gold, is a delightful touch of fairy's fancy, and the
whole passage is perfect in its daintiness. It was in the cowslip
flowers that Ariel used to hide when owls on the wing came
crying by, lest he should be mistaken for an insect or a little
bird by the hungry hunter.

There can be no doubt that Shakespeare felt very tenderly
towards this small wild flower, and for myself, I confess I have
put the cowslip, as it were, on one side by itself, as a flower that
I am positively certain Shakespeare once actually had in his
hand and delighted in.

How very seldom we can be certain that he did this with other flowers! As we have already seen, he does not mention any of the blossoms that go to make the country so fair to see— the May and the wild-rose, golden broom and purple heather, bluebell and poppy and buttercup.

What other wild flowers, except as noxious weeds, does he mention? They are the primrose, oxlip, long purples, violet, daffodil, honeysuckle (or woodbine), lady-smocks, and love-inidleness. Of the oxlip, he says only that it is 'bold,' and grows on Titania's bank, 'where the wild thyme blows;' of the ladysmocks, that they are 'silver white,' and, with violets, daisies, and cockoo-buds 'do paint the meadows with delight;' of love-inidleness (viola tricolor), that it is 'a little purple western flower,' the juice of which has magical properties; of long-purples (which, I take it, were 'lords-and-ladies,' for to this day' our cold maids do deadmen's-fingers call them '), that they were in Ophelia's 'fantastic garland.'

Of the other four there is more to be said.

The violet is the 'nodding' violet, beneath which the zephyrs blow so gently as 'not wagging his sweet head.' It is the 'violet dim'-'sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes or Cytherea's breath'-'the blue-veined' 'purple' violet. Shakespeare repeatedly recurs to its fragrance.

'To throw a perfume on the violet

Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.'

'Sweet not lasting, the perfume and suppliance of a minute, no more.'

'When he lived, his breath and beauty set
Gloss on the rose, smell to the violet.'

'It came o'er my ear like the sweet sound
That breaks upon a bank of violets
Stealing and giving odour.'

'The forward violet thus did I chide :

Sweet thief, whence dost thou steal thy sweet that smells,
If not from my love's breath? the purple pride,

Which in my love's veins for fair complexion dwells,

On thy soft cheek thou hast too grossly dyed.'

'Dim' is a singular yet very beautiful epithet for the flower; the poet seems to wish to qualify it with a 'but,' for he says, 'but sweeter than,' etc., as if his meaning of 'dim' might be misunderstood. This was, perhaps, owing to the fact that he sometimes used 'dim' in a disagreeable sense, as, 'dim as an ague's fit' and as 'murky ;' thus, 'not Erebus itself were dim enough;' and 'dim night,' for death. But there can be no doubt of what he meant-pale, faint-nor of the identity of the flower he speaks of.

With the primrose it may be different. Even when it is the 'pale' primrose, it might be the Fair Maid of February, the snowdrop. The flower that's like thy face, pale primrose,' says the brother of dead Imogen, whose face probably was not primrose yellow nor yet primrose green, as artists declare the colour to be, and as Spenser calls it, 'the primrose greene.' If it were dead white, it would be like the snowdrop, which in some parts of England is an unlucky flower, because, says Folkart, 'it looks like a corpse in its shroud. Again, the Queen says, in Henry VI., ‘Look pale as primrose with blood-drinking sighs'—that is, bloodless, white-not primrose yellow. In an old song we read, 'Primrose, first child of Ver, and with her bells dim.' Shakespeare makes Ariel say that he lies in a cowslip's 'bell,' and uses 'dim,' as we have just seen, for 'pale;' so 'bells dim' may mean 'pale cups;' or again, as it is called the first child of Ver, it may be the snowdrop that is intended when 'bells' would be strictly accurate. Again, Perdita says—

'Pale primroses

That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength,'

which is much more applicable to the wan and solitary snow-
drop that often perishes before the sunshine is come, than to the
primrose blooming in its happy family life well into sunny May.
'This primrose bank' and 'faint primrose beds' may only mean
banks of spring flowers, and I believe myself that ‘faint' has no
allusion to colour, but is in a most special way characteristic of
Shakespeare.