ROSEMAR V. 
183 
“ Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse ” repeats 
Capulet, and this reminds one of Dekker’s touching account of 
the bride who died of the plague on her wedding night. “ Here 
is a strange alteration ; for the rosemary that was washed in 
sweet water, to get out the bridal, is now wet in tears to furnish 
her burial.” 
“ For bridal or burial,” wrote Herrick, in his lines on a branch 
of rosemary ; and rosemary is evidently an important accessory 
of a wedding in his eyes, although in the “ Epithalamium on Sir 
Clipseby Crew and his Lady ” it is marjoram and not rosemary 
that crowns the head of Hymen — 
“ Hymen, O Hymen ! tread the sacred ground, 
Show thy white feet and head with marjoram crowned ! ”* 
But in another place Herrick speaks of the gilding of rosemary 
in preparation for the wedding day : f — 
“This done, we’ll draw lots who shall buy 
And gild the bays and rosemary ; 
What posies for our wedding rings. 
What gloves we’ll give, and ribbonings.” 
And the gilding of the rosemary takes me back again to another 
old custom, the dipping of sprigs and branches in water at both 
weddings and funerals. At my Portuguese death-bed the rose- 
mary was dipped in holy water, but in the old accounts it is 
usually scented water or “ common ” water that is used. 
In Beaumont and Fletcher’s “ Scornful Lady ” it is asked 
“ Were the rosemary branches dipped ? ” in connection with a 
bridal ; but in another old play reference is made to the same 
custom when a funeral is in question. 
“ If there be 
Any so kind as to accompany 
My body to the earth, let there not want 
For entertainment. Prithee, see they have 
A sprig of rosemary dipt in common water, 
To smell at as they walk along the streets. 
There is something very pleasant in the thought of these 
dripping, sweet-scented branches of the rosemary — the plant of 
remembrance — being carried to the grave, even as it is pleasant 
to think of the herb of holy rejoicing being worn at bridals ; and 
as I looked down at my sturdy little shrub I wondered if the 
beautiful old custom had completely gone out of use ? Some- 
times the village people had come to me for bunches of rue 
when there was a funeral, but although I had heard that in other 
countries rosemary was still in demand, both for weddings and 
* Dekker’s “Wonderful Year,” 1608. 
t According to Brand, “ so late as the year 1698 the old country use appears to 
have been kept up of decking a bridal bed with rosemary,” and the bridesmaids 
were accustomed to present the bridegroom with a bunch of it on the morning of 
the wedding. 
J Carbright’s “Ordinary.” 
