The Hawthorn. 
5* 
Learn then, content, young shepherd, from this tree, 
Whose greatest wealth is Nature’s livery.” 
The scent of the hawthorn is proverbially sweet; and this 
same Dan Chaucer, in his “ Complaint of the Black Knight,” 
remarks: 
“There sawe I growing eke the freshe hauthorne, 
In white motley, that so sote doeth ysmell. ” 
In the olden days our jolly forefathers made great use of 
this aromatic-smelling tree, which then, as now, was more 
commonly known by its favourite name of “ May,” from its 
flowering in that month. May, the queen of blossoms, was 
greeted on her arrival with all the royal rejoicings that her 
incoming deserved, and few, from sovereign down to poorest 
peasant, but strove their best to pay her due honour. May 
was kept universally, and, it is said, even the avenues of the 
metropolis looked like bowers, from the boughs which each 
man hung over his doorway. The young people of both sexes 
went a-Maying, accompanied by bands of music ; people of 
all ranks joined in the pastimes, from Bluff King Hal, who 
rode a-Maying from Greenwich to Shooters’ Hill, with Queen 
Katharine and his merry Court; indeed, “ every man, except 
impediment,” as old Stowe quaintly remarks, “would walk 
into the sweet meadows and green woods, there to rejoice 
their spirits with the beauty and savour of sweet flowers, and 
with the harmony of birds praising God in their kind.” No 
Oriental Feast of Roses was more sacredly observed or carried 
out with greater glee than was the old English custom of May¬ 
ing. Houses and churches were as habitually decked on May- 
day with the blossom of the hawthorn, as they were at Christ¬ 
mas with holly; and, as Spenser tells us in his “ Shepherd’s 
Calendar,” would 
Youth’s folk now flocken everywhere, 
To gather May-baskets and smelling breere; 
And home they hasten the posts to dight. 
And all the kirk-pillars ere daylight, 
With hawthorn-buds, and sweet eglantine, 
And garlands of roses, and sops-in-wine.” 
Herrick, in his “ Hesperides,” has a beautiful idyll descrip¬ 
tive of the manner in which they went a-Maying in his days; 
and in it he thus invokes his mistress : 
4—2 
