in their wild and native homes, but in
the gardens of farmhouses and parsonages, country houses, and noblemen's
stately pleasaunces. The quotations that I have been able to make from
the early writers in the ninth and tenth centuries, down to gossiping
old Gerard, the learned Lord Chancellor Bacon, and that excellent old
gardiner Parkinson, all show the same thing, that the love of flowers is
no new thing in England, still less a foreign fashion, but that it is
innate in us, a real instinct, that showed itself as strongly in our
forefathers as in ourselves; and when we find that such men as
Shakespeare and Lord Bacon (to mention no others) were almost proud to
show their knowledge of plants and love of flowers, we can say that such
love and knowledge is thoroughly manly and English.

In the inquiry into Shakespeare's plants I have entered somewhat largely
into the etymological history of the names. I have been tempted into
this by the personal interest I feel in the history of plant names, and
I hope it may not have been uninteresting to my readers; but I do not
think this part of the subject could have been passed by, for I agree
with Johnston: "That there is more interest and as much utility in
settling the nomenclature of our pastoral bards as that of all
herbalists and dry-as-dust botanists" ("Botany of the Eastern Border").
I have also at times entered into the botany and physiology of the
plants; this may have seemed needless to some, but I have thought that
such notices were often necessary to the right understanding of the
plants named, and again I shelter myself under the authority of a
favourite old author: "Consider (gentle readers) what shiftes he shall
be put unto, and how rawe he must needs be in explanation of metaphors,
resemblances, and comparisons, that is ignorant of the nature of herbs
and plants from whence their similitudes be taken, for the inlightening
and garnishing of sentences."--NEWTON'S _Herball for the Bible_.

I have said that my subject naturally divides itself into two parts,
first, The Plants and Flowers named by Shakespeare; second, His
Knowledge of Gardens and Gardening. The first part is now concluded, and
I go to the second part, which will be very much shorter, and which may
be entitled "The Garden-craft of Shakespeare."

FOOTNOTES:

[327:1] The reading of the folio is "young tree," for "Yew tree."

[328:1]

"An Eu tre (Ewetre); taxus, taximus."--_Catholicon Anglicum._