38 A BOOK ABOUT ROSES. 



desses, to Venus, they dedicated this the fairest 

 of their flowers ; and the highest praise which 

 they could offer to beauty, was to assert its resem- 

 blance 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 generally have been between 

 forty and fifty distinguished princes, with Ulysses, 

 who ought to have known better, at their head, 

 loafing about the mansion of Papa Tyndarus) — 

 Helen, fair and frail, rosa mundi non rosa munday 

 had, we are told, cheeks like a Rose, though not 

 perhaps a blush one. Other belles of the past had 

 — so Anacreon, Theocritus, and the poets gener- 

 ally, inform us — rosy arms, rosy necks, rosy feet, 

 and — delicacy forbids me to translate poSoKoXno? 

 and poSoTtvyoi. "Burning Sappho" — it would 

 have been more gentlemanly, I think, if Byron had 

 called her gushing — crowned the Rose, Queen of 

 Flowers, being herself, according to Meleager, the 

 Rose of Poesy ; and her readers crowned them- 

 selves with the Rose (one can't help wondering 

 whether the nimble earwig ever ran down their 

 Grecian noses), and vied with each other, at their 

 banquets, ixTtXrjrraiv rov? ^povvov^, to astonish 

 the Browns, with Roses. There was a flower-mar- 



