Labiata, by its spikes of rich violet-purple flowers, varying sometimes to pink. Balm, as regards beauty of aspect, is the least effective of any of the series, the flowers being white and insignificant, and half-concealed among the dark-hued foliage. It must not be confounded with the source of Balm-of-Gilead, mention of which is also made by Shakspere, and upon various occasions, as will be noticed in due course. How the name came to be extended to a plant relatively of such little importance as the melissa, does not appear. It is one of the bequests of the fanciful and conjectural botany of the middle ages.

Silence is the perfectest herald of joy:-I were but little happy if I could say how much.-Much Ado, ii., I.

HE Shaksperean references to farm-plants, after the same manner as those to garden esculents, are interesting chiefly in the light they reflect upon the agriculture of the period. Some are of the kind that belong to every age and country, the greater portion for instance of the allusions to grass:

When Phoebe doth behold

Her silvery visage in the watery glass,

Decking with liquid pearl the bladed grass.

Midsummer Night's Dream, i., I.

Mowing like grass,

Your fresh-fair virgins and your flowering infants.

P

Henry the Fifth, iii., 3.

These tidings nip me, and I hang the head

As flowers with frost, or grass beat down with storm.
Titus Andronicus, iv., 4.

Say to her, we have measured many miles

To tread a measure with her on this grass.

Love's Labour's Lost, v., 2.

Now and then, in allusion to the same, some pretty old superstition or rural custom comes in for notice, as at the opening of the Merchant of Venice, when Antonio is telling his friends of his anxieties:

ANTONIO: In sooth I know not why I am so sad;
It wearies me; you say it wearies you.

SALARIO: Your mind is tossing on the ocean;

There, where your argosies with portly sail,
Like signiors and rich burghers of the flood,
Or, as it were, the pageants of the sea,
Do overpeer the petty traffickers,

That curt'sey to them reverence

As they fly by them with their woven wings.
SALANIO: Believe me, sir, had I such venture forth,
The better part of my affections would

Be with my hopes abroad. I should be still
Plucking the grass to know where sits the wind.

A more primitive mode of forecasting the weather it
would be difficult to find, unless, perhaps, in the con-
templation in the olden time of the scarlet pimpernel,
the "shepherds' weather-glass."
The allusion is very
appositely introduced, the idea being that in times of
profound anxiety, men turn to the most trivial signs and
tokens of the possible future. Roger Ascham did not
discredit it. "This way," says he, in his famous old
treatise upon Archery, 1571, "I used in shooting.

Betwixt the markes was an open place. There I take a fethere, or a lyttle grasse, and so learned how the wind stood."

The

Shakspere's references to grass are probably not fewer than twenty or thirty, but he never means anything precise as to kind. No term applied to the vegetable productions of the soil is used in a broader sense. number of genuine botanical grasses in England considerably exceeds a hundred, and of these about thirty help to supply the natural food of sheep and cattle, though not more than fifteen different kinds ever occur in the same meadow. Mingled with them there are scores of little plants which, botanically, are not grasses at all. The word is to be taken, accordingly, in Shakspere as it is colloquially, or as denoting the components, whatever they may be, of the turf, the meadow, and pasture of every description.

"Corn" is to be understood in much the same way, or as a general term for cereal grain, though the appellation may at times be made specific. In Shakspere this word occurs upon at least twenty occasions, sometimes in reference to corn as an article of food; sometimes, as it has been for thousands of years (corn being an adjunct, as well as one of the factors of civilisation), as an emblem of prosperity and wealth—

No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil.--Tempest, ii., 1.

I am right glad to catch this good occasion,
Most thoroughly to be winnowed, where my chaff
And corn shall fly asunder.-Henry the Eighth, v., I.

Occasionally there is a fine image of some other kind, as in Cranmer's flattering prophecy of the grand reign of Elizabeth:

Her foes shake like a field of beaten corn,

And hang their heads with sorrow.—Ibid, v., 4.

Why droops my lord, like over-ripened corn
Hanging the head at Ceres' plenteous load?

2nd Henry the Sixth, i., 2.

First let me teach you how to knit again

This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf.-Titus, v., 3. When, in the Midsummer Night's Dream, i., 2, Oberon says,

and Titania replies,

Am not I thy lord?

Then I must be thy lady. But I know
When thou hast stolen away from fairy-land,
And in the shape of Corin sat all day,

Playing on pipes of corn, and versing love,

she refers particularly to oats, the stems of which, just before they begin to change colour, supply tolerably inflexible tubes, which, with a little trimming, can be converted into pipes, suitable in clever hands for imitation of such music as that of the "great god Pan," when he resorted to the "reeds by the river." In ancient times these little pipes were a favourite musical instrument with shepherds, as appears both from Ovid (Met., i., 677) and from Virgil, whose reference to them is almost the first thing learned in school-boy Latin,

Tityre, tu, patulæ recubans sub tegmine fagi,

Silvestrem tenui Musam meditaris avenâ.-Ecl. i., 1, 2.