Shakspere's contemporary, Sir Philip Sidney:-"Her breath is more sweet than a gentle south-west wind which comes sweeping over flowery fields and shadowed waters." Perhaps Shakspere may have had in his mind that beautiful verse in the Song of Solomon-“ Come, thou south wind; blow upon my garden, that the odours thereof may flow out" (iv., 16). "South," rather than "sound" is acceptable also from its bringing the passage into agreeable harmony with another in Cymbeline, quite as familiar:

O thou goddess,

Thou divine Nature, how thyself thou blazon'st
In these two princely boys! They are as gentle
As zephyrs, blowing beneath the violet,
Not wagging his sweet head; and yet as rough,
Their royal blood unchaf'd, as the rudest wind
That by the top doth take the mountain pine,
And make him stoop to the vale.—(iv., 2.)

In two places the violet is employed metaphorically:

Welcome, my son! Who are the violets now,
That strew the green lap of the new-come spring?
Richard the Second, v., 2.

"Who are the courtiers, that is, who attend on Bolingbroke, now in the spring-time of his reign?" The other instance is in that profoundly moving scene, in pathos and delicacy of finish unsurpassed anywhere in Shakspere, where poor dove-like Ophelia, most spirituelle of all his conceptions of feminine grace, stainless as the pearl of the deep sea, fragile as the blue flax blossom, capable herself only of innocence and celestial trustful

ness, and who never told her love, is warned by her brother not to believe too confidently :

For Hamlet, and the trifling of his favour,
Hold it a fashion, and a toy in blood;
A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute-
No more!

OPHELIA: No more but so?

LAERTES: Think it no more!

Still she is unconvinced; woman's faith, where the heart has once gone over, is impregnable; her father himself scarcely makes deeper impression:

OPHELIA: My lord, he hath importun'd me with love

In honourable fashion.

POLONIUS: Ay, fashion you may call it.

Go to; go to.

OPHELIA And hath given countenance to his speech, my lord, With almost all the holy vows of heaven.

POLONIUS: Ay, springes to catch woodcocks.

The end we all know. towards it at present. in Sonnet xii. :

There is no need to go further Compare, rather, the tender lines

When I behold the violet past prime,

And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white,

Then of thy beauty do I question make,

That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,
And die as fast as they see others grow.

"Prime" and "primy," in the above passages, signify

of or belonging to the Spring, as again in Sonnet xcvi. :—

The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime.

66

Forward," in turn, means early," as in Sonnet xcix., above quoted. "" Favour means appearance or complexion, thence the countenance, as in many other

places.

My life upon't, young though thou art, thine eye
Hath stay'd upon some favour that it loves.

Twelfth Night, ii., 4.

So in As You Like It :

The boy is fair,

Of female favour, and bestows himself
Like a ripe sister.—(iv., 3.)

And in Pericles :

Ah, how your favour's changed!—(iv. 1.)

The remaining allusions to the violet, making the total of eighteen, occur in the Midsummer Night's Dream, ii., 2, in Oberon's little song, "I know a bank," upon which, in its season,

in Cymbeline, i., 6,

The nodding violet grows;

The violets, cowslips, and the primroses,

Bear to my closet;

in King Henry the Fifth, iv., 1, "I think the king is but a man as I am; the violet smells to him as it doth to me;" in Measure for Measure, ii., 2,

It is I,

That lying by the violet, in the sun,
Do as the carrion does, not as the flower,
Corrupt with virtuous season;

in Love's Labour's Lost, v., 2,

When daisies pied, and violets blue,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue,
And Lady-smocks, all silver-white,

Do paint the meadows with delight,

where, as violets, definitely so called, never grow in the open "meadows," we are to understand, by the latter word, in regard to these flowers, the country in general; and, on a second occasion, in Venus and Adonis,

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

Chapter Sixth.

THE PANSY.

My crown is in my heart, not on my head;
Nor decked with diamonds and Indian stones,
Nor to be seen:-my crown is called Content.

3rd Henry the Sixth, iii., 1.

HE pansy, Viola tricolor, is, like the violet, a genuine English wild-flower, coming up abundantly in dry waste places, especially where the soil has been ploughed, and blooming freely from April till October. There can be no doubt that it was one of the first to be brought into the garden, where the form and colours would soon improve. All the early botanists make mention of it as a wellknown plant, some giving rude woodcut representations, as Matthiolus, in the very curious Epitome de Plantis, printed at Florence in 1586, in which volume it is called