OF GARLANDS 153 



unto plants preventing drunkenness, or discussing the 

 exhalations from wine ; wherein, beside roses, taking 

 in ivy, vervain, melilote, Sec, they made use of divers 

 of small beauty or good odour. The solemn festival 

 garlands were made properly unto their gods, and 

 accordingly contrived from plants sacred unto such 

 deities ; and their sacrificial ones were selected under 

 such considerations. Their honorary crowns triumphal, 

 ovary, civical, obsidional, had little of flowers in them : 

 and their funebrial garlands had little of beauty in them 

 besides roses, while they made them of myrtle, rose- 

 mary, apium, &c, under symbolical intimations ; but 

 our florid and purely ornamental garlands, delightful 

 unto sight and smell, nor framed according to any 

 mystical and symbolical considerations, are of more 

 free election, and so may be made to excel those of 

 the ancients : we having China, India, and a new world 

 to supply us, beside the great distinction of flowers 

 unknown unto antiquity, and the varieties thereof arising 

 from art and nature. 



But, beside vernal, aestival and autumnal, made of 

 flowers, the ancients had also the hyemal garlands ; 

 contenting themselves at first with such as were made 

 of horn dyed into several colours, and shaped into the 



