In some book of travels, I forget which, the writer states, that he had seen the primrose in Mysore and in the recesses of the Pyrenees.  There is a flower sold by the Bengallee gardeners for the primrose, though it bears but small resemblance to the English flower of that name.  On turning to Mr. Piddington’s Index to the Plants of India I find under the head of Primula—­Primula denticula—­Stuartii—­rotundifolia—­with the names in the Mawar or Nepaulese dialect.

[061] In strewing their graves the Romans affected the rose; the Greeks amaranthus and myrtle:  the funeral pyre consisted of sweet fuel, cypress, fir, larix, yew, and trees perpetually verdant lay silent expressions of their surviving hopes. Sir Thomas Browne.

[062] The allusion to the cowslip in Shakespeare’s description of Imogene must not be passed over here.—­

                            On her left breast
    A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drop
    I’ the bottom of the cowslip.

[063] The Guelder rose—­This elegant plant is a native of Britain, and when in flower, has at first sight, the appearance of a little maple tree that has been pelted with snow balls, and we almost fear to see them melt away in the warm sunshine—­Glenny.

[064] In a greenhouse

[065] Some flowers have always been made to a certain degree emblematical of sentiment in England as elsewhere, but it was the Turks who substituted flowers for words to such an extent as to entitle themselves to be regarded as the inventors of the floral language.

[066] The floral or vegetable language is not always the language of love or compliment.  It is sometimes severe and scornful.  A gentleman sent a lady a rose as a declaration of his passion and a slip of paper attached, with the inscription—­“If not accepted, I am off to the war.”  The lady forwarded in return a mango (man, go!)

[067] No part of the creation supposed to be insentient, exhibits to an imaginative observer such an aspect of spiritual life and such an apparent sympathy with other living things as flowers, shrubs and trees.  A tree of the genus Mimosa, according to Niebuhr, bends its branches downward as if in hospitable salutation when any one approaches near to it.  The Arabs, are on this account so fond of the “courteous tree” that the injuring or cutting of it down is strictly prohibited.

[068] It has been observed that the defense is supplied in the following line—­want of sense—­a stupidity that “errs in ignorance and not in cunning.”

[069] There is apparently so much doubt and confusion is to the identity of the true Hyacinth, and the proper application of its several names that I shall here give a few extracts from other writers on this subject.