108 PKOSEKPINA. 



familiar opposition,) certainly does not consist merely in 

 the flowers being innocent, and the weed stinging and 

 venomous. We do not call the nightshade a weed in our 

 hedges, nor the scarlet agaric in our woods. But we do 

 the corncockle in our fields. 



4:. Had the thoughtful little tutoress gone but one 

 thought farther, and instead of " a vegetable in a wrong 

 place," (which it may happen to the innocentest vegetable 

 sometimes to be, without turning into a weed, therefore,) 

 said, "A vegetable which has an innate disposition to get 

 into the wrong place," she would have greatly furthered 

 the matter for us; but then- she perhaps would have felt 

 herself to be uncharitably dividing with vegetables her 

 own little evangelical property of original sin. 



5. This, you will find, nevertheless, to be the very 

 essence of weed character in plants, as in men. If you 

 glance through your botanical books, you will see often 

 added certain names ' a troublesome weed.' It is not its 

 being venomous, or ugly, but its being impertinent 

 thrusting itself where it has no business, and hinders other 

 people's business that makes a weed of it. The most 

 accursed of all vegetables, the one that has destroyed for 

 the present even the possibility of European civilization, 

 is only called a weed in the slang of its votaries ; * but in 

 the finest and truest English we call so the plant which 



* And I have too harshly called our English vines, ' wicked weeds of 

 Kent,' in Fors Clavigera, xxvii. 11. Much may be said for Ale, when 

 wo brew it for our people honestly. 



