210 On the Campus 



Universalist. A volume has been written to prove the 

 man a soldier; another that he was a lawyer, a printer, 

 a fisherman, a freemason, and here are five or six arti- 

 cles to show that Shakespeare was a gardener. 1 



All this simply means that the poet had a marvelous 

 faculty for close observing ; that his vision was accurate, 

 his instinct wonderfully true. It may be therefore worth 

 our while to study for a little this remarkable man from 

 the standpoint of the naturalist, to see how he who so 

 vividly paints a passion can paint a flower; how the 

 man who limns a character, till beyond the photograph 

 it starts to actuality, will catch the essential features of 

 some natural truth. 



We shall nowhere lack for material. Shakespeare has 

 abundant use for flowers and trees. Other poets before 

 his day had mentioned vegetable forms indeed, mentioned 

 them in plenty and observed some of them with great 

 precision. Chaucer and Spenser, for instance, both use 

 the world of plants wherewith to adorn their songs and 

 stories; but it requires only the briefest examination to 

 show that these earlier writers use their material in an 

 entirely different way; on purpose, so to speak; that is, 

 the flower, plant, or tree is introduced purely as a matter 



i In preparation of this article, the author has consulted chiefly 

 the following: John Gerarde, The Herball or General Historic of 

 Plants, 1597 ; Shakespeare, Edward Dowden, 1872 ; William Shake- 

 speare, Works, Globe edition, 1867; Natural History of Shake- 

 speare, Bessie Mayou, 1877; Shakespeare's England, William Win- 

 ter, 1894; The Plant-lore and Garden-craft of Shakespeare, Rev. 

 Canon, H. F. Ellacombe, 1896; The Gardener's Chronicle-, sundry 

 pamphlets, and shorter articles; Shakespeare's Works, annotated 

 edition, Sir Sidney Lee ; Shakespeare Once More, James E. Lowell, 

 1868. 



