PLANT-LORE OF SHAKESPEARE 
3i 
Bitter-Sweet, see apple (22). 
Blackberries. 
(1) Give you a reason on compulsion!—if reasons were as plentiful as 
Blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion, I. 1 
1 st Henry IV, ii. 4, 263. 
(2) Shall the blessed sun of heaven prove a micher and eat Blackberries? 
Ibid., 450. 
(3) That same dog-fox Ulysses is not proved worth a Blackberry. 
Troilus and Cressida, v. 4, 12. 
(4) There is a man .... hangs odes upon Hawthorns and elegies on 
Brambles .—As You Like It, iii. 2, 379. 
(5) The thorny Brambles and embracing bushes, 
As fearful of him, part, through whom he rushes. 
Venus and Adonis, 629. 
I here join together the tree and the fruit, the Bramble 
(.Rubus fruticosus) and the Blackberry. There is not much 
to be said for a plant that is the proverbial type of a barren 
country or untidy cultivation, yet the Bramble and the Black¬ 
berry have their charms, and we could ill afford to lose them 
from our hedgerows. The name Bramble originally meant 
anything thorny, and Chaucer applied it to the Dog Rose— 
“ He was chaste and no lechour, 
And sweet as is the Bramble flower 
That bereth the red hepe.” 
But in Shakespeare’s time it was evidently confined to the 
Blackberry-bearing Bramble. 
There is a quaint legend of the origin of the plant which 
is worth repeating. It is thus pleasantly told by Waterton : 
“The cormorant was once a wool merchant. He entered 
1 See Raisins, 
