al arrow-shot is described in well-known lines in _A
Midsummer Night's Dream_ (Act ii., scene I). Oberon speaks of Cupid
loosing his "love shaft smartly from the bow" at "a fair vestal throned
in the west." Cupid missed his mark, and the poet continues:--

"Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell:
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound,
And maidens call it Love-in-idleness."

The name Love-in-idleness should be Love-in-idle if the metre could have
allowed it. This means love-in-vain: witness the Anglo-Saxon bible,
where occurs the phrase to take God's name "in idle." The flower
referred to by Shakespeare is doubtless the pansy.

Some names recall the work of more modern people. Thus the wild
chamomile was known in the Eastern counties as _Mawther_; and this, as
all lovers of Dickens will remember, means not a mother but a girl; and
the name is in fact a translation of the Greek Parthenion into the
Suffolk dialect.

The elder used to be known as the _bour-tree_. I fear that the name is
extinct in England, but a Scotch friend tells me that he was familiar
with it in his youth. I love this name because it is associated in my
mind with the words of Meg Merrilees {106} in _Guy Mannering_, the first
English classic in which I took pleasure.

"Aye, on this very spot the man fell from his horse--I was behind the
bour-tree bush at the very moment. Sair, sair he strove, and sair he
cried for mercy; but he was in the hands of them that never kenn'd the
word!"

The actual origin of the name is, however, not romantic; it is said to
mean _bore_, and to refer to the fact that tubes were made from it by
boring out the pith. It seems possible that such tubes were, in
primitive times, used to blow the fire, and this would explain the name
elder, which seems to mean _kindler_.

The dwarf elder, a distinct species, though not connected with an
individual, commemorates a race, being known as Dane's blood. It grows
on the Bartlow Hills, near Cambridge, where tradition says that Danes
were killed in battle.

I add a few names as being picturesque, though without any literary
associations.

There is an old name for the shepherd's purse, viz., clapperde-pouch,
which is said to allude to the leper who stood at the cross-ways
announcing his presence with a bell and clapper, and begged for pennies
to put in his pouch, which is typified by the seed capsule. Anot