In My Vicarage Garden 



Take my song's blessing and depart, 

 Type of true service — unrequited heart ; '' 



for it seems likely that the daffodils this year will 

 almost last into the summer. Nor must I stop 

 long with the Christmas roses. There are still a 

 few of the true ones {helleborus niger), but they 

 are poor and ragged, and I have scarcely picked 

 a good one all the winter. Yet they always have 

 their interest. I have been looking into their his- 

 tory, and I cannot believe that our white Christ- 

 mas rose is the Hellebore of Theophrastus and 

 Pliny. It differs in many respects, and is not 

 found at Anticyra, and I think their Hellebore 

 is our Veratrum. Yet all the old writers identify 

 it with the classical plant, and speak very posi- 

 tively about its virtues ; though they seem to 

 have little ground for the belief beyond the 

 " signatures," which taught them that a plant 

 with black roots must be good for the black bile, 

 melan-cholia. Burton, in his Anatomy of lilelan- 

 choly, has a long chapter on the plant, and evi- 

 dently believed in it as a cure for melancholy ; 

 and Cole, in his Adam in Eden, 1657, goes still 

 further, affirming it to be not only " effectual for 

 melancholick, dull, and heavy persons, as ques- 

 tionless it is by signatures," but further " neither 

 is it without great efficacy to cure those that 

 seeme to be possessed with the Devil." These 

 virtues it has long lost or never had ; it is used 

 as a medicine in some parts of Europe, but is 

 not admitted into the English Pharmacopceia. 



S2 



