OUR QUEEN OF BEAUTY. 37 



ens receive their first communion with wreaths of 

 white Roses on their heads.* 



Passing from sacred to secular records, shall I 

 take down my Greek Lexicons, my Scott and 

 Liddell, Donnegan the fat and Hederic the slim, 

 my Dictionaries, Indices, and Gradus ad Parnas- 

 sum ? Shall I look out poSor and rosa, collect a 

 few quotations, dress up a few incidents, and then 

 try to convince my readers that I know every 

 word which classic authors have written anent the 

 Rose ? Shall I, having just discovered some sen- 

 tence bearing on my theme, and having hardly 

 translated it (lame and broken-winded is the Pe- 

 gasus 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 electro-plate, and 

 commence magniloquent passages with — *'the 

 educated reader will of course remember," and 

 *' every school-boy knows"? — No; I promised to 

 write sans ettLcie, and much more sans humbug 

 also; and it will suffice to say, without dictionaries 

 or high-falutenation, that the classical writers, 

 from Homer to Horace, extol above all other 

 flowers the Rose. To the fairest of their god- 



* Syria, according to some writers, took its name from Suri, a 

 species of Rose indigenous to it. 



