THE LITERATURE OF THE ROSE. 



2 9 



THE LITERATURE OF THE ROSE. 

 By Arthur William Paul, F.R.H.S., of Waltham Cross. 



[Read April 1, 1913; Mr. G. Gordon, V.M.H., in the Chair.] 



Viewed in its widest sense the literature of the Rose may be said to 

 have its origin in very remote times. Wherever the flower grew and 

 flourished it appears to have compelled the admiration alike of the 

 artist, the poet, and the student of natural history, so that we are 

 confronted with a large number of allusions to it in the writings 

 that have come down to us from ancient Greece and Rome as well as 

 in those that have survived from the Middle Ages. With these however 

 I do not propose to trouble you, especially as we shall have occasion 

 to notice more than one work of modern times dealing exhaustively 

 with this particular phase of rose-lore, and I think it will be amply 

 sufficient if we commence our researches at the period when, with the 

 general revival of learning, botany and horticulture began to take a 

 more prominent position among the sciences and arts of the world. 

 Even with this limitation so abundant are the materials at our disposal 

 that it will not be possible to do more than take a cursory glance at 

 them within the time at our disposal, but with your permission I shall 

 have the pleasure of directing your attention to what appear to me 

 the most important and interesting of them. As a guide to works on 

 the subject that had appeared up to the commencement of the nine- 

 teenth century an excellent bibliography of the Rose by the French 

 botanist Thory, dated 1818, will be found affixed to the first volume of 

 the folio edition of Redout£'s Les Roses, and since that time a less 

 comprehensive attempt has been made by a Spanish author and pub- 

 lished in Madrid in 1892,* but a complete and up-to-date bibliography 

 is still a desideratum. 



The first monograph of the Rose which I can find recorded was 

 written in Latin by Nicolas Monardes, a physician of Seville, and 

 printed in Antwerp about the middle of the sixteenth century. It 

 is entitled De rosa el partibus ejus and was included in the author's 

 work De secanda vena in pleuritide. I have not seen the original edition, 

 but it was reprinted in Clusius' Exoticorum, published in Antwerp 

 in 1605, an d m this f Qrm * s easily obtainable by the curious ; it deals 

 largely with the medical and economic uses of the Rose. 



Taking Monardes' work as our starting-point, I propose to divide 

 the subject into three periods or epochs : the first includes two 

 hundred years, from the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the 

 eighteenth century ; the second includes the succeeding hundred 

 years to the middle of the nineteenth century ; and the third period 

 comprises the latter half of the nineteenth century and continues 

 up to the present time. 



* Bibliografia de la Rosa, por D, Mariano Vergara, 



