ices were less valued.

The weekly preparation of the Papers was a very pleasant study to
myself, and introduced me to much literary and horticultural information
of which I was previously ignorant. In republishing them I hope that
some of my readers may meet with equal pleasure, and with some little
information that may be new to them.

H. N. E.

BITTON VICARAGE, GLOUCESTERSHIRE,
_May, 1878_.

INTRODUCTION.

All the commentators on Shakespeare are agreed upon one point, that he
was the most wonderfully many-sided writer that the world has yet seen.
Every art and science are more or less noticed by him, so far as they
were known in his day; every business and profession are more or less
accurately described; and so it has come to pass that, though the main
circumstances of his life are pretty well known, yet the students of
every art and science, and the members of every business and profession,
have delighted to claim him as their fellow-labourer. Books have been
written at various times by various writers, which have proved (to the
complete satisfaction of the writers) that he was a soldier,[1:1] a
sailor, a lawyer,[1:2] an astronomer, a physician,[1:3] a divine,[1:4] a
printer,[1:5] an actor, a courtier, a sportsman, an angler,[2:1] and I
know not what else besides.

I also propose to claim him as a fellow-labourer. A lover of flowers and
gardening myself, I claim Shakespeare as equally a lover of flowers and
gardening; and this I propose to prove by showing how, in all his
writings, he exhibits his strong love for flowers, and a very fair,
though not perhaps a very deep, knowledge of plants; but I do not intend
to go further. That he was a lover of plants I shall have no difficulty
in showing; but I do not, therefore, believe that he was a professed
gardener, and I am quite sure he can in no sense be claimed as a
botanist, in the scientific sense of the term. His knowledge of plants
was simply the knowledge that every man may have who goes through the
world with his eyes open to the many beauties of Nature that surround
him, and who does not content himself with simply looking, and then
passing on, but tries to find out something of the inner meaning of the
beauties he sees, and to carry away with him some of the lessons which
they were doubtless meant to teach. But Shakespeare was able to go
further than this. He had the great gift of