ants that do best perfume the air. Roses,
damask and red, are fast flowers of their smells, so that you may walk
by a whole row of them, and find nothing of their sweetness, yea, though
it be in a morning's dew. Bays, likewise, yield no smell as they grow,
Rosemary little, nor Sweet Marjoram; that which above all others yields
the sweetest smell in the air is the Violet, especially the white double
Violet which comes twice a year, about the middle of April, and about
Bartholomew-tide; next to that is the Musk-rose."--_Essay of Gardens._

The Roses mentioned in Nos. 34, 51, and 52 as a mixture of red and white
must have been the mottled or variegated Roses, commonly called the York
and Lancaster Roses;[253:1] these are old Roses, and very probably
quite as old as the sixteenth century. There are two varieties: in one
each petal is blotched with white and pink; this is the R. versicolor of
Parkinson, and is a variety of R. Damascena; in the other most of the
petals are white, but with a mixture of pink petals; this is the Rosa
mundi or Gloria mundi, and is a variety of R. Gallica.

These, with the addition of the Eglantine or Sweet Brier (_see_
EGLANTINE), are the only Roses that Shakespeare directly names, and they
were the chief sorts grown in his time, but not the only sorts; and to
what extent Roses were cultivated in Shakespeare's time we have a
curious proof in the account of the grant of Ely Place, in Holborn, the
property of the Bishops of Ely. "The tenant was Sir Christopher Hatton
(Queen Elizabeth's handsome Lord Chancellor) to whom the greater portion
of the house was let in 1576 for the term of twenty-one years. The rent
was a Red Rose, ten loads of hay, and ten pounds per annum; Bishop Cox,
on whom this hard bargain was forced by the Queen, reserving to himself
and his successors the right of walking in the gardens, and gathering
twenty bushels of Roses yearly."--CUNNINGHAM. We have records also of
the garden cultivation of the Rose in London long before Shakespeare's
time. "In the Earl of Lincoln's garden in Holborn in 24 Edw. I., the
only flowers named are Roses, of which a quantity was sold, producing
three shillings and twopence."--HUDSON TURNER.

My space forbids me to enter more largely into any account of these old
species, or to say much of the many very interesting points in the
history of the Rose, but two or three points connected with
Shakespeare's Roses must not be passed over. First, its name.