PAP AVER RHOEAS. 75 



palm fruit. The palm, in the shorthand of their art, grad- 

 ually becomes a symmetrical branched ornament with two 

 pendent bosses ; this is again confused with the Greek iris, 

 (Homer's blue iris, and Pindar's water-flag, ) and the Floren- 

 tines, in adopting Byzantine ornament, read it into their own 

 Fleur-de-lys ; but insert two poppyheads on each side of the 

 entire foil, in their finest heraldry. 



15. Meantime the definitely intended poppy, in late Chris- 

 tian Greek art of the twelfth century, modifies the form of the 

 Acanthus leaf with its own, until the northern twelfth-century 

 workman takes the thistle-head for the poppy, and the thistle- 

 leaf for acanthus. The true poppy-head remains in the south, 

 but gets more and more confused with grapes, till the Re- 

 naissance carvers are content with any kind of boss full of 

 seed, but insist on such boss or bursting globe as some essen- 

 tial part of their ornament ; the bean-pod for the same rea- 

 son (not without Pythagorean notions, and some of republican 

 election) is used by Brunelleschi for main decoration of the 

 lantern of Florence duomo ; and, finally, the ornamentation 

 gets so shapeless, that M. Violet-le-Duc, in his 'Dictionary of 

 Ornament,' loses trace of its origin altogether, and fancies the 

 later forms were derived from the spadix of the arum. 



16. I have no time to enter into farther details ; but 

 through all this vast range of art, note this singular fact, that 

 the wheat ear, the vine, the fleur-de-lys, the poppy, and the 

 jagged leaf of the acanthus- weed, or thistle, occupy the entire 

 thoughts of the decorative w r orkmen trained in classic schools, 

 to the exclusion of the rose, true lily, and other the flowers of 

 luxury. And that the deeply underlying reason of this is in 

 the relation of weeds to corn, or of the adverse powers of nat- 

 ure to the beneficent ones, expressed for us readers of the 

 Jewish scriptures, centrally in the verse, " thorns also, and 

 thistles, shall it bring forth to thee ; and thou shalt eat the 

 herb of the field" (xopros, grass or corn), and exquisitely 

 symbolized throughout the fields of Europe by the presence 

 of the purple 'corn-flag,' or gladiolus, and 'corn-rose' (Ge- 

 rarde's name for Papaver Rhoeas), in the midst of carelessly 

 tended corn ; and in the traditions of the art of Europe by 



