THE QUINCE. 43 



yield pleasure, but health," alluding perhaps to their use 

 in medicine. Pliny says that the varieties were numerous, 

 and particularizes four sorts, adding that all these " are 

 kept shut up in the ante-chambers of great men, where 

 they receive the visits of their courtiers ; they are hung 

 too upon the statues that pass the night with us in our 

 chambers." How sad a decline from honours like these, 

 when a modern writer derives its French name coignas- 

 sier from the circumstance that its " disagreeable odour " 

 usually causes it to be banished to a corner (coin) of the 

 garden ! It is not everywhere, however, that taste has 

 thus changed, for Professor Targioni, an Italian writer on 

 horticulture, says that at the present day it is much 

 prized by the peasantry in some parts of the South of 

 Europe for perfuming their stores of linen, and in yet 

 warmer lands it is still found as gratifying to the palate 

 as to the nostrils, for a recent traveller states that the 

 quince of Persia ripens on the tree or after gathering, 

 and losing all its austerity and becoming like a soft ripe 

 pear, is eaten at the dessert as a much prized delicacy, 

 and yearly forwarded as presents to Bagdad ; the highly 

 perfumed odour being so powerful that it is said, with 

 perhaps a tinge of Oriental exaggeration, that if there be 

 but a single quince in a caravan, no one who accompanies 

 it can remain unconscious of its presence. 



Spreading from Italy almost throughout Europe, it now 

 grows spontaneously in most countries of mild tempera- 

 ture, and, as Gerard informs us, was common in his time 

 in the hedges of England ; but never ripening here suffi- 

 ciently to be eaten raw, and having lost, perhaps undeser- 

 vedly, much of the repute which it enjoyed two or three 

 centuries ago on account of its medicinal properties, it is 

 now very seldom met with, and many persons are to be 

 found, even among those who have been born and brought 

 up in the country, who have never tasted or perhaps so 

 much as seen a quince. More generally cultivated, wher- 

 ever it does still claim the cultivator's attention, as a 

 stock whereon to graft the pear in order to dwarf the 

 growth of that tree or to hasten the ripening of its fruit, 

 than for the sake of its own produce, the latter is yet 



