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Athens, on his banishment to the Isle of Elba, threatened to 

 return to Paris with the coming of the violets; for which 

 prosaic history has known him as "Corporal Violet" ever 

 since. He did not, however, promise to come peacefully nor 

 empty-handed, nor "As gentle as Zephyrs, blowing below 

 the violet," and the wild- wood calendar tells me that he 

 fulfilled his threat, for back he came, neither gently nor 

 empty-handed, to make the Bourbons wish that violets had 

 never been invented. The Bonapartes seem, indeed, rather 

 to have run to violets and one is led to wonder whether it 

 was respect for his uncle, or a renewed memory of Athens, or 

 merely a pure love for the flower itself which induced Napo- 

 leon III to adopt it as his. And when, at Chiselhurst we see 

 the stricken Eugenie trying to comfort herself over the loss 

 of her Prince Imperial and thinking sadly of the mounds 

 of violets on his bier, may she not perhaps have felt the force 

 of the old message: %\ \t i / 



" Weep no more, lady, weep no more, 

 Thy sorrowe is in vaine; 

 For violets pluckt, the sweetest showers 

 Will ne'er make grow againe." 



// 



But we must leave these principaUties and powers, these 

 royalties and personages with their crowns and their ermine, 

 their crosses and their sorrows, and return to our alleys 

 green, "to the musty reek that lingers about dead leaves 

 and last year's ferns," and seek the modest flowers of our 

 dingle. And the profusion of them ! We often hear of carpets 



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