I.," act v, sc. 4.

There is no flower so often mentioned by Shakespeare as the Rose, and he
would probably consider it the queen of flowers, for it was so deemed in
his time. "The Rose doth deserve the cheefest and most principall place
among all flowers whatsoever, being not onely esteemed for his beautie,
vertues, and his fragrant and odoriferous smell, but also because it is
the honore and ornament of our English Scepter."--GERARD. Yet the
kingdom of the Rose even then was not undisputed; the Lily was always
its rival (_see_ LILY), for thus sang Walter de Biblesworth in the
thirteenth century--

"En co verger troveroums les flurs
Des queus issunt les doux odours (swote smel)
Les herbes ausi pur medicine
La flur de Rose, la flur de Liz (lilie)
Liz vaut per royne, Rose pur piz."

But a little later the great Scotch poet Dunbar, who lived from 1460 to
1520, that is, a century before Shakespeare, asserted the dignity of the
Rose as even superior to the Thistle of Scotland.

"Nor hold none other flower in sic dainty
As the fresh Rose of colour red and white;
For if thou dost, hurt is thine honesty,
Considering that no flower is so perfite,
So full of virtue, pleasaunce, and delight,
So full of blissful angelic beauty,
Imperial birth, honour, and dignity."

Volumes have been written, and many more may still be written, on the
delights of the Rose, but my present business is only with the Roses of
Shakespeare. In many of the above passages the Rose is simply the emblem
of all that is loveliest and brightest and most beautiful upon earth,
yet always with the underlying sentiment that even the brightest has its
dark side, as the Rose has its thorns; that the worthiest objects of our
earthly love are at the very best but short-lived; that the most
beautiful has on it the doom of decay and death. These were the lessons
which even the heathen writers learned from their favourite Roses, and
which Christian writers of all ages loved to learn also, not from the
heathen writers, but from the beautiful flowers themselves. "The Rose is
a beautiful flower," said St. Basil, "but it always fills me with sorrow
by reminding me of my sins, for which the earth was doomed to bear
thorns." And it would be easy to fill a volume, and it would not be a
cheerless volume, with beautiful and expressive passages from poets,
preachers, and other authors, who have tak