THE EGG-PLANT. 295 



Which grew in Paradise, the bait of Eve, 

 Us'd by the Tempter : on that prospect strange 

 Their earnest eyes they fix'd, imagining, 

 For one forbidden tree, a multitude." 



****** 

 " They, parched with scalding thirst, and hunger fierce, 



could not abstain ; 



But on they rolled in heaps, and up the trees 

 Climbing, sat thicker than the snaky locks 

 That curl'd Alegaera : Greedily they pluck'd 

 The fruitage fair to sight, like that which grew 

 Near that bituminous lake where Sodom placed ; 

 This more delusive, not the touch but taste 

 Deceives ; they fondly thinking to allay 

 Their thirst with gust, instead of fruit 

 Chew'd bitter ashes, which the offended taste 

 With sputtering noise rejected." 



Henry Teonge, a chaplain in the English fleet, 

 whose Diary was, a few years since, published from 

 the original manuscript, so well describes the real 

 condition of the decayed Solatium Sodomeum, which 

 he states that he saw in December, 1675, that no one 

 can doubt that his notice was founded upon personal 

 examination. " This country (that about the Dead 

 Sea) is altogether unfruitfull," says he, " being all 

 over full of stones, which looke just like burnt syn- 

 durs. And on some low shrubbs there grow small 

 round things, which are called apples, but no witt 

 like them. They are somewhat fayer to looke at, but 

 touch them and they moulder all to black ashes, like 

 soote, boath for looks and smell." Though these are 

 only the remarks of a popular observer, who told 

 what he saw, without any view to a scientific purpose, 

 the single addition of the attack of the plant by the 

 insect, and the subsequent mortification and internal 

 drying, would have made it just as perfect as the 

 descriptions of the present day. 



Pocock, who travelled more than fifty years after 

 Teonge, did not see the apples; and though he did 

 mention them, he pointed to a plant very different 



