42 OUR COMMON FRTJITS. 



find herself wholly neglected and all her graces attributed 

 to some commonplace " pretty girl of England " were 

 Hercules still lingering upon earth, to see himself shut 

 out from the "ring" and all his labours popularly sup- 

 posed to have been achieved by some puny Ben Gaunt 

 or Benicia Boy then might the once renowned Quince 

 find sympathizing fellow- sufferers in the doom that has 

 fallen upon it, degraded as it is from its former proud 

 position as the " golden apple " for which even divinities 

 contested, to be now the least known and least esteemed 

 of all the pomal tribe. It does not profess to be the 

 Scriptural "apple of gold," that being identified with a 

 more peculiarly Syrian product ; it may not be the Hes- 

 peridean fruit of the earliest age of Greece, though in 

 spite of opposing theories some have even attributed to 

 it this honour ; but there seems every reason to connect 

 it with some at least of the numerous Greek legends in 

 which golden apples so prominently figure, for no other 

 fruit then known answers so well to the description, and 

 we can scarcely account otherwise for what is known to 

 be a fact, viz., that among the ancients it was dedicated 

 to Venus and looked on as the emblem of happiness and 

 love ; the temples of Cyprus and Paphos were decorated 

 with it; it was the special ornament of the statues of 

 Hymen; the figure of Hercules now in the Tuileries 

 garden is represented with this fruit in his hand ; and ac- 

 cording to Plutarch, Solon made a law that it should form 

 the invariable feast of the bridegroom (and some say of 

 the bride too) before retiring to the nuptial couch. A 

 native of Greece, it grew most abundantly in the neigh- 

 bourhood of Cydon in Crete (now Candia), deriving 

 thence the name Cydonia, which is still continued as its 

 botanical cognomen, and was thence taken to Rome, 

 where also, under the name of Cotonea (a reminiscence of 

 which was preserved in its old English title of Melicotone) ; 

 it was looked on as a sacred fruit, though, as regards mere 

 secular uses, it seems to have been more prized for its 

 scent than its savour, the climate perhaps not bringing it 

 to such perfection as it had attained in Greece, though 

 Columella particularly mentions that " Quinces not only 



