202 PROSERPINA. 



which rains fools upon them like frogs, I can no more with 

 any hope or patience conceive ; but this finally I repeat, con- 

 cerning my own books, that they are written in honest Eng- 

 lish, of good Johnsonian lineage, touched here and there with 

 colour of a little finer or Elizabethan quality : and that the 

 things they tell you are comprehensible by any moderately 

 industrious and intelligent person ; and accurate, to a degree 

 which the accepted methods of modern science cannot, in my 

 own particular fields, approach. 



11. Of which accuracy, the reader may observe for imme- 

 diate instance, my extrication for him, from among the uvu- 

 larias, of these five species of the Butterwort ; which, being 

 all that need be distinctly named and remembered, do need 

 to be first carefully distinguished, and then remembered in 

 their companionship. So alike are they, that Gerarde makes 

 no distinction among them ; but masses them under the gen- 

 eral type of the frequent English one, described as the second 

 kind of his promiscuous group of ' Sanicle,' " which Clusius 

 calleth Pinguicula ; not before his time remembered, hath 

 sundry small thick leaves, fat and full of juice, being broad 

 towards the root and sharp towards the point, of a faint green 

 colour, and bitter in taste ; out of the middest whereof 

 sprouteth or shooteth up a naked slender stalke nine inches 

 long, every stalke bearing one flower and no more, sometimes 

 white, and sometimes of a bluish purple colour, fashioned 

 like unto the common Monkshoods " (he means Larkspurs) 

 " called Consolida Regalis, having the like spur or Lark's heel 

 attached thereto." Then after describing a third kind of 

 Sanicle (Cortusa Mathioli, a large-leaved Alpine Primula,) he 

 goes on : " These plants are strangers in England ; their nat- 

 ural country is the alpish mountains of Helvetia. They grow 

 in my garden, where they flourish exceedingly, except Butter- 

 woort, which groweth in our English squally wet grounds," 

 (' Squally/ I believe, here, from squalidus, though Johnson 

 does not give this sense ; but one of his quotations from Ben 

 Jonson touches it nearly : "Take heed that their new flowers 

 and sweetness do not as much corrupt as the others' dryness 

 and squalor," and note farther that the word 'squall,' in the 



