146 Garlands of Flowers. 



mighty with amazement — there he sees movements and regula- 

 tions with which all the combined ingenuity of man cannot 

 compare. We may learn from profane history how much the 

 study of vegetables induces the mind to its proper sense of grati- 

 tude, and how much it created in the breasts of the heathen them- 

 selves a veneration and religious awe for the Author of all things ; 

 for although they were not blessed with a knowledge of pure reli- 

 gion, they had too much good sense to suppose that vegetation 

 was a matter of chance ; and they therefore attributed each gift 

 of nature to some peculiar god, their minds not being sufficiently 

 expanded to conceive a just idea of the Deity, except indeed 

 those master-minds who traced, in the regularity and uniformity 

 displayed in all organized nature, the hand of one supreme 

 creator, and who adored him under the name of Pan, the uni- 

 versal spirit The worship of Flora among those heathen 

 nations may be traced up to very early days. She was an ob- 

 ject of religious veneration among the Phocians and Sabines 

 long before the foundation of Rome ; and the early Greeks wor- 

 shipped her under the name of Chloris. The Romans instituted 

 a festival in honor of Flora as early as the time of Romulus, as 

 a kind of rejoicing at the appearance of the blossoms, which 

 they welcomed as the harbingers of fruits. The festival games 

 or Floralia were not, however, regularly instituted until five 

 hundred and sixteen years after the foundation of Rome, when, on 

 consulting the celebrated books of the Sybil, it was ordained that 

 the feast should be annually kept on the twenty-eighth day of April, 

 four days before the kalends of May. These prophetic books 

 had a college of priests appointed to undertake the charge of 

 them, and were held in such reverence that they were never con- 

 sulted unless the state was in danger, and then only with the 

 greatest solemnity. From the writings of Pliny the elder, we 

 learn that the worship of this goddess had been greatly neglected, 

 and that it was not until after some unfruitful seasons that the 

 Sybilline books were consulted, which ordained that the feast 

 of Flora should be celebrated with regularity, so as to ensure the 

 well-flowering and kindly-shedding of the blossoms of all species 

 of plants. 



This festival was introduced into Britain by the Romans, and 

 was kept up as late as the time of Henry the Eighth. Flowers, 

 among the Eastern nations, were not only used as a stimulus to 



