112 MAY. 



day, at Whitsuntide, and on other holiday oc- 

 casions, the houses were profusely decorated 

 with them, and they were strewn before the 

 door. Over the extinction of many popular 

 customs I cannot bring myself to grieve; but 

 there is something so pure and beautiful in the 

 plentiful use of flowers, that I cannot but la- 

 ment the decay of these. Perhaps the most 

 touching of our popular uses of flowers is that 

 of strewing the dead with them, designating the 

 age, sex, or other particular circumstances, by 

 different flowers. How expressive in the hand 

 of a fair young girl, cut oil' in her early spring, 

 are a few pure and drooping snow-drops, an 

 image exquisitely employed by Chantrey in liis 

 celebrated piece of sculpture — the two Chil- 

 dren at Litchfield. Let the pensile lily of the 

 valley for ever speak of the gentle maid that 

 has been stricken down in her May ; and the 

 fair white lily of the youth shorn in his un- 

 sullied strength ; and let those who have passed 

 through the vanities of time have 



Flowers of all hues, and with its thorn the rose. 

 But even this tender custom is on the decline, 

 from a needless notion that they generate in- 

 sects, and tend to destroy the body they adorn. 

 In reality, however, the love of flowers never 

 was stronger in any age or nation than in ours. 

 We have, perhaps, less love of showy festivity 



