In one instance the citation of the hawthorn is metaphorical, and like Benedick's of the willow, in Much Ado, upon the lines of the facetious. Coming from lively old Sir John, it could hardly be anything else: "I cannot cog, and say this and that, like a many of these lisping hawthorn buds that come like women in man's apparel, and smell like Bucklersbury in simple time."- Merry Wives, iii., 3. The picture of the "Verdant Greens" of the day, their mincing and affected talk, and their overdone self-perfumery, is perfect. Bucklersbury, a famous old London street, was in Shakspere's time noted for the number of its druggists, dealers, at that period, chiefly in odoriferous dried herbs "simples," in the popular vocabulary. Why the knight should select "hawthorn-buds" rather than any other kind, as good for his scented foplings, does not, however, appear. It is a little singular, to say the least, that one of the old English names for these buds, when just expanding, is "Ladies' meat."

Mention of the hawthorn is scarcely ever made by the ancient or classical poets, and then only in reference to its supposed efficacy in averting the evil effects of unkind enchantments, intimidating demons, and healing snakebites. Of the first-named superstition we have an instance in the Fasti, where a wand made of the wood is bestowed with a view to the protection of the sleeping infant from the red-jawed harpies (vi., 129, 165).

Chaucer makes amends in a well-known beautiful passage. Most indeed of the old English poets have

something to say about the hawthorn, and this, generally in connection with the season of its bloom.

Amongst the many buds proclaiming May,
Decking the fields in holiday array,
Striving who shall surpass in braverie,

Marke the fair blooming of the hawthorn tree,
Who finely cloathed in a robe of white,

Fills full the wanton eye with May's delight.

Remember, while reading these and all similar old English verses, that the year, in the time of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspere, and onwards up to 1752, reckoned from twelve days later than at present, "May-day" being then what with ourselves is May 13th. All descriptions of spring and of the vernal charms of nature apply to a corresponding or twelve days' later period.

THE BOX-TREE.

Concerning other aboriginal British trees, Shakspere has very little to say, and the allusions, when they occur, have reference almost exclusively, to the economic uses. To introduce natural objects for purposes beyond simple illustration, or the giving of elegance to a picture, was no part, as already observed, of his design. There is no ground for surprise, accordingly, that what remains is of trifling amount. The box-tree, for example (if this be really British), being an evergreen, and extremely dense in foliage, becomes in Twelfth Night, ii., 5, a good hiding-place,-"Get ye all three into the box-tree." We must not think of it from the diminutive variety employed

in gardens as a fence or "edging" for flower-borders, nor even from the bushy character attained in shrubberies. When the circumstances of its long life are fairly congenial, the box-tree is capable of attaining very considerable dimensions. At Clifton Lodge, near Shefford, Bedfordshire, there is one (unless since destroyed,) which, when measured in 1865, was found to be close on twenty-two feet high; the general spread of the branches was twenty-six feet; and the trunk at a yard above the ground, was fifteen inches in diameter. How much the

box was esteemed by the ancients as an ornamental evergreen, hardly needs saying. Ovid refers to it in his perpetuoque virens buxus (Met. x., 97). In another place he well characterizes the abundant and close-set foliage, densa foliis (A. A., iii., 691). Virgil speaks of the same in that beautiful passage where he describes the hills as undans, "waving," the epithet, which properly belongs to the branches of the trees, being transferred from the living thing to the inanimate one. When introduced into the intensely artificial gardens of the ancient Romans, this patient tree was subjected, like the yew, to that odious clipping into grotesque and unnatural forms, which in the Shaksperean age had become fashionable in England, and of which there are memorials still extant. The practice was consistent with the manners and customs of a people who loved barbarities and the blood of gladiators; but it is one from which all genuine and cultured taste recoils, and with Shakspere, we may be sure, it found no favour. Fine examples of the box in