PREFACE. The following Notes on the Plant-Lore and Garden-Craft of Shakespeare were published in The Garden from March to September, 1877. They are now republished with additions and with such corrections as the altered form of publication required or allowed, As the Papers appeared from week to week, I had to thank many correspondents (mostly complete strangers to my self) for useful suggestions and inquiries; and I would again invite any further suggestions or remarks, especially in the way of correction of any mistakes or omissions that I may have made, and I should feel thankful to anyone that would kindly do me this favour. In republishing the Papers, I have been very doubtful whether I ought not to have rejected the cultural remarks on several of the plants, which I had added with a special reference to the horticultural character of The Garden newspaper. But I decided to retain them, on finding that they interested some readers, by whom the literary and Shakespearean notices were less valued. The weekly preparation of the Papers was a very pleasant study to myself, and introduced me to much literary and horticultural information of which I was previously ignorant. In republishing them I hope that some of my readers may meet with equal pleasure, and with some little information that may be new to them. Bitton Vicarage, Gloucestershire, May, 1878. H. N. E. INTRODUCTION. ALL the commentators on Shakespeare are agreed upon one point, that he was the most wonderfully many-sided writer that the world has yet seen. Every art and science are more or less noticed by him, so far as they were known in his day; every business and profession are more or less accurately described; and so it has come to pass that, though the main circumstances of his life are pretty well known, yet the students of every art and science, the members of every business and profession, have delighted to claim him as their fellow-labourer. Books have been written at various times by various writers, which have proved (to the complete satisfaction of the writers) that he was a soldier, a sailor, a lawyer, an astronomer, a physician, a preacher, an actor, a courtier, a sportsman, and I know not what else besides. A lover I also propose to claim him as a fellow-labourer. of flowers and gardening myself, I claim Shakespeare as equally a lover of flowers and gardening; and this I propose to prove by showing how, in all his writings, he exhibits his strong love for flowers, and a very fair, though not perhaps a very deep, knowledge of plants; but I do not intend to go further. That he was a lover of plants I shall have no difficulty in showing; but I do not, therefore, believe that he was ever a professed gardener, and I am quite sure he can in no sense be claimed as a brother-botanist, in the scientific sense of the term. His knowledge of plants was simply the knowledge that every man may have who goes through the world with his eyes open to the many beauties of Nature that surround him, and who does not content himself with simply looking, and then passing on, but tries to find out something of the inner meaning of the beauties he sees, and to carry away with him some of the lessons which they were doubtless meant to teach. But Shakespeare was able to go further than this. He had the great gift of being able to describe what he saw in a way that few others have ever arrived at; he could communicate to others the pleasure that he felt himself, not by long descriptions, but by a few simple words, |