38 A BOOK ABOUT ROSES. 



dress up a few incidents, and then try to convince my read- 

 ers that I know every word which classic authors have 

 written anent the Rose ? Shall I, having just discovered 

 some sentence bearing on my theme, and having hardly 

 translated it (lame and broken-winded is the Pegasus now, 

 which once cantered in Oxford riding-schools, and jumped 

 with a mighty effort, and a wily tutor whipping behind, the 

 statutory bars) — shall I proudly display my electroplate, 

 and commence magniloquent passages with — " the edu- 

 cated reader will of course remember," and '' every school- 

 boy knows" ? — No ; I promised to write sans etude, and 

 therefore sans humbug also ; and it will suffice to say, with- 

 out dictionaries or high-falutenation, that the classical writ- 

 ers, from Homer to Horace, extol above all other flowers 

 the Rose. To the fairest of their goddesses, to Venus, they 

 dedicated this the fairest of their flowers ; and the highest 

 praise which they could offer to beauty, was to assert its 

 resemblance to the Rose. Aurora had rosy fingers ; I 

 always thought of her at school, and envied her as of one 

 who had been among the strawberries ; and beautiful 

 Helen, with whom the world was in love (there must gene- 

 rally have been between forty and fifty distinguished prin- 

 ces, with Ulysses, who ought to have known better, at their 



