OUR QUEEN OF BEAUTY 37 



I, having just discovered some sentence bearing on 

 my theme, and having hardly translated it (lame 

 and broken-winded is the Pegasus now, which once 

 cantered in Oxford riding-schools and jumped with 

 a mighty effort, and a wily tutor whipping behind, 

 the statutory bars) — shall I proudly display my 

 electro-plate, and commence magniloquent passages 

 with — 'the educated reader will of course remember,' 

 and ' every schoolboy knows ' ? — No ; I promised 

 to wTite sans itude, and much more sans humbug 

 also; and it will suffice to say, without dictionaries 

 or high-falutenation, that the classical writers, from 

 Homer to Horace, extol above all other flowers 

 the Rose. To the fairest of their goddesses, to 

 Venus, they dedicated this the fairest of their 

 flowers ; and the highest praise which they could 

 offer to beauty, was to assert its resemblance to the 

 Rose. Aurora had rosy fingers ; I always thought 

 of her at school, and envied her as of one who 

 had been among the strawberries : and beautiful 

 Helen, with whom the world was in love (there 

 must generally have been between forty and fifty 

 distinguished princes, with Ulysses, who ought to 

 have known better, at their head, loafing about the 

 mansion of Papa Tyndarus) — Helen, fair and frail, 

 rosa inu7tdi non rosa munda^ had, we are told, 

 cheeks like a Rose, though not perhaps a blush 



