"Fat" is here to be understood as referring to the dulness and sluggishness induced by obesity, which is an image, in turn, of the paralysing effects of the herb. The plant supplying this famous drug was the Mandragora officinalis, one of the Solanaceæ, indigenous to Palestine,. especially upon Mount Carmel and near Nazareth, also to Syria and Greece. Sibthorp, who gives a drawing of it in the Flora Græca, 232, says that about Athens it is "not rare." In appearance it resembles a primrose, only that the flowers are purplishwhite, and are followed by orange-coloured berries, Rachel's dudha'im, above-mentioned, in old authors called "love-apples." The root, long-enduring, is very large, fleshy, and forked, so as to present a grotesque image of the human body. Trimmed with the knife, so as to intensify the likeness, it became the equally famous "mandrake" of the middle ages. To find a vegetable production more burdened with superstitions during that period of history would probably be impossible. The ridiculous little images, called "puppettes" and "mammettes," accredited with magical powers, and made the centre of innumerable absurdities, fetched high prices with the simple. The detail, were it worth while, would fill a chapter; fortunately, the whole matter exhausted long ago by Sir Thos. Browne, in the “Vulgar Errors." was Shakspere himself adverts to these old fancies, of course not accepting, but in deference to the legends of his time: Would curses kill, as doth the mandrake's groan, 2nd Henry the Sixth, iii., 2. And shrieks, like mandrakes', torn out of the earth, Romeo and Juliet, iv., 3. He refers also to the "puppettes," in 2nd Henry the Fourth, i., 2, and again in iii., 2. In connection with the mandragora, it may be interesting to mention that the Greeks gave this plant, for another name, Circæa, in reference to the renowned enchantress. Circæa, as a botanical name, has long been transferred to a pretty and innocent little flower of the woodlands, which thus inherits also the appellation, in default of the history so unintelligible, of "Enchanters' nightshade." The introduction, in Much Ado, iii., 4, of another famous medicinal plant of the middle ages, the Carduus Benedictus, or "Holy Thistle," brings us back to life's merriment. For now we are again beside Beatrice, cheered by the remembrance, as she enters, that all Shakspere's greatest characters have humour in their souls, and that all these greatest, though they can be serious enough when occasion requires, never take their leave without having at times induced a smile, the priceless function of all that is truly good. At the same moment we have sly, shrewd, roguish Margaret, and dear little Hero, her mistress, who never fails in modesty and gentleness. Beatrice is at loving war with the "young lord of Padua," Benedick. Margaret has read that "this worthy hearbe," the Benedictus, was named the blessed thistle for his singular vertues as well againste poysons, as the pestilent agues and other perilous diseases of the heart." Where, when, ever lived the woman who would let slip so golden a chance! Beatrice says, "I am sick." MARGARET: Get you some of the distilled Carduus Benedictus, and lay it to your heart. It is the only thing for a qualm! BEATRICE: Benedictus! Why Benedictus? You have some moral in this Benedictus! MARGARET: Moral! No, by my troth, I have no moral meaning. I meant plain Holy Thistle! That we may believe or not, as we like. Beatrice, pretend as she may, knows quite well what Margaret Chapter Fourteenth. BOOK AND HEARSAY NAMES. Full many a glorious morning have I seen Sonnet xxxiii. HE mass of all language, even of such portions as on the surface seem purely literal, consists either of metaphors, or of short crystallised similes. Language teems also, as it must needs, with expressions referring to objects and phenomena of which the people who use them can very seldom have personal knowledge, but which objects no one ever hesitates to talk of as if familiar. The whirlpool and the volcano, crocodiles, sharks, and scorpions, are as much a part of the popular vocabulary as trees and oxen. The poets' language, most particularly, is crowded with such expressions, many of them primæval. They are employed, however, in very different ways. The inferior man simply copies; he is only a scribe: the master uses them as prisms, and by this we discover him. When Shakspere adopts metaphors from the ancients, we get lamps, as of old; but, as in the Arabian tale, they are new" ones in exchange for the exhausted. His repetitions never carry the look of the second-hand; his echoes are as charming as the originalities. Possessed of the sweet aptitude for observing personally, first and finest of the fine arts, without which there can be no true greatness, he sees everything that his predecessors saw, and sees it with Shaksperean eyes besides. knew better, moreover, than to adventure upon uncertain ground, simply for the sake of being novel. Better often than to be very new is it to be very old, stepping forth like one of the goddesses in Homer. He The trees unknown to Shakspere as living objects, but which he introduces upon hearsay, are the palm, the cedar, the pine, the laurel or bay, the myrtle, and the olive. Mention is made also of cypress-wood and of Balm-of-Gilead, neither of which articles did he ever see. One or two of the trees may have been seen by him in some garden when he wrote. His references to them were founded, nevertheless, upon simple bookknowledge. Of Balm, Balsam, or Balsamum, meaning Balm-ofGilead, the sevenfold famous medicament of Scripture, |