s day, +kynosbatos+) and the Anemone with
the Rose, and the Scholia comment on the passage thus--"Anemone, a
scentless flower, which they report to have sprung from the blood of
Adonis; and again Nicander says that the Anemone sprung from the blood
of Adonis."

The storehouse of our ancestors' pagan mythology was in Ovid, and his
well-known lines are--

"Cum flos e sanguine concolor ortus
Qualem, quae; lento celant sub cortice granum
Punica ferre solent; brevis est tamen usus in illis,
Namque male haerentem, et nimia brevitate caducum
Excutiunt idem qui praestant nomina, venti,"--

Thus translated by Golding in 1567, from whom it is very probable that
Shakespeare obtained his information--

"Of all one colour with the bloud, a flower she there did find,
Even like the flower of that same tree, whose fruit in tender rind
Have pleasant graines enclosede--howbeit the use of them is short,
For why, the leaves do hang so loose through lightnesse in such
sort,
As that the windes that all things pierce[15:1] with everie little
blast
Do shake them off and shed them so as long they cannot last."[15:2]

I feel sure that Shakespeare had some particular flower in view. Spenser
only speaks of it as a flower, and gives no description--

"In which with cunning hand was pourtrahed
The love of Venus and her Paramoure,
The fayre Adonis, turned to a flowre."

_F. Q._, iii, 1, 34.

"When she saw no help might him restore
Him to a dainty flowre she did transmew."

_F. Q._, iii, 1, 38.

Ben Jonson similarly speaks of it as "Adonis' flower" (Pan's
Anniversary), but with Shakespeare it is different; he describes the
flower minutely, and as if it were a well-known flower, "purple
chequered with white," and considering that in his day Anemone was
supposed to be Adonis' flower (as it was described in 1647 by Alexander
Ross in his "Mystagogus Poeticus," who says that Adonis "was by Venus
turned into a red flower called Anemone"), and as I wish, if possible,
to link the description to some special flower, I conclude that the
evidence is in favour of the Anemone. Gerard's Anemone was certainly the
same as ours, and the "purple" colour is no objection, for "purple" in
Shakespeare's time had a very wide signification, meaning almost a