useful. As ornamental plants, the large
Fennels (F. Tingitana, F. campestris, F. glauca, &c.) are very desirable
where they can have the necessary room.

FOOTNOTES:

[89:1] "Fennelle or Fenkelle, feniculum maratrum."--_Catholicon
Anglicum._

[89:2]

"_Christophers._

No, my _good lord_.

_Count._

Your _good lord_! O, how this smells of Fennel."

BEN JONSON, _The Case Altered_, act ii, sc. 2.

FERN.

_Gadshill._

We have the receipt of Fern-seed--we walk invisible.

_Chamberlain._

Now, by my faith, I think you are more beholding to the night
than to Fern-seed for your walking invisible.

_1st Henry IV_, act ii, sc. 1 (95).

There is a fashion in plants as in most other things, and in none is
this more curiously shown than in the estimation in which Ferns are and
have been held. Now-a-days it is the fashion to admire Ferns, and few
would be found bold enough to profess an indifference to them. But it
was not always so. Theocritus seems to have admired the Fern--

"Like Fern my tresses o'er my temples streamed."

_Idyll_ xx. (_Calverley._)

"Come here and trample dainty Fern and Poppy blossom."

_Idyll_ v. (_Calverley._)

But Virgil gives it a bad character, speaking of it as "filicem
invisam." Horace is still more severe, "neglectis urenda filix
innascitur agris." The Anglo-Saxon translation of Boethius spoke
contemptuously of the "Thorns, and the Furzes, and the Fern, and all the
weeds" (Cockayne). And so it was in Shakespeare's time. Butler spoke of
it as the--

"Fern, that vile, unuseful weed,
That grows equivocably without seed."

Cowley spoke the opinion of his day as if the plant had neither use nor
beauty--

"Nec caulem natura mihi, nec Floris honorem,
Nec mihi vel semen dura Noverca dedit--
Nec me sole fovet, nec cultis crescere in hortis
Concessum, et Foliis gratia nulla meis--
Herba invisa Deis poteram coeloque videri,
Et spurio Terrae nata puerperio."

_Plantarum_, lib. i.

And later still Gilpin, who wrote so much on the beauties of country
scenery at the close of the last century, has nothing better to say for
Ferns than that they are noxious weeds, to be classed with "Thorns and