G1UL1ETTA. 231 



of artists and colonists ; truths essential to their skill, and 

 inexorable upon their labour. 



21. The pen-drawing facsimiled by Mr. Allen with more 

 than his usual care in the frontispiece to this number of 

 ' Proserpina, ' was one of many executed during the investiga- 

 tion of the schools of Gothic (German, and later French), 

 which founded their minor ornamentation on the serration of 

 the thistle leaf, as the Greeks on that of the Acanthus, but 

 with a consequent, and often morbid, love of thorny points, 

 and insistance upon jagged or knotted intricacies of stubborn 

 vegetation, which is connected in a deeply mysterious way 

 with the gloomier forms of Catholic asceticism.* 



22. But also, in beginning 'Proserpina,' I intended to give 

 many illustrations of the light and shade of foreground leaves 

 belonging to the nobler groups of thistles, because I thought 

 they had been neglected by ordinary botanical draughtsmen ; 

 not knowing at that time either the original drawings at Oxford 

 for the 'Flora Grseca/ or the nobly engraved plates executed in 

 the close of the last century for the ' Flora Danica ' and c Flora 

 Londinensis.' The latter is in the most difficult portraiture 

 of the larger plants, even the more wonderful of the two ; and 

 had I seen the miracles of skill, patience, and faithful study 

 which are collected in the first and second volumes, published 

 in 1777 and 1798, I believe my own work would never have 

 been undertaken.^ Such as it is, however, I may still, health 

 being granted me, persevere in it ; for my own leaf and branch 

 studies express conditions of shade which even these most ex~ 



nera Pulveris. ' The three kinds of Desert specified of Reed, Sand, 

 and Rock should be kept in mind as exhaustively including the 

 states of the earth neglected by man. For instance of a Reed desert, 

 produced merely by his neglect, see Sir Samuel Baker's account of the 

 choking up of the bed of the White Nile. Of the sand desert, Sir F. 

 Palgrave's journey from the Djowf to Hayel, vol. i. , p. 92. 



* This subject is first entered on in the 'Seven Lamps,' and carried 

 forward in the final chapters of 'Modern Painters,' to the point where 

 I hope to take it up for conclusion, in the sections of ' Our Fathers have 

 told us ' devoted to the history of the fourteenth century. 



f See in the first volume, the plates of Sonchus Arvensis and Tussi- 

 lago Petasites ; \u the second, Carduus tomentosus and Picris Echioidea. 



