Plant-lore of shakespeare 
48 
(io) Marcus, we are but shrubs, no Cedars we. 
Titus Andronicus , iv. 3, 45. 
(ij) I have sent him where a Cedar, 
Higher than all the rest, spreads like a Plane 
Fast by a brook. — Two Noble Kinsmen , ii. 6, 4. 
(12) The sun ariseth in his majesty; 
Who doth the world so gloriously behold 
That Cedar-tops and hills seem burnished gold. 
Venus and Adonis , 856. 
(13) The Cedar stoops not to the base shrub’s foot, 
But low shrubs wither at the Cedar’s root.— Lucrece , 664. 
The Cedar is the classical type of majesty and grandeur, and 
superiority to everything that is petty and mean. So Shake¬ 
speare uses it, and only in this way; for it is very certain he 
never saw a living specimen of the Cedar of Lebanon. But 
many travellers in the East had seen it and minutely described 
it, and from their descriptions he derived his knowledge of the 
tree; but not only, and probably not chiefly from travellers, for 
he was well acquainted with his Bible, and there he would 
meet with many a passage that dwelt on the glories of the 
Cedar, and told how it was the king of trees, so that “ the Fir 
trees were not like his boughs, and the Chestnut trees were not 
like his branches, nor any tree in the garden of God was like 
unto him in his beauty, fair by the multitude of his branches, 
so that all the trees of Eden that were in the garden of God 
envied him ” (Ezekiel xxxi. 8, 9). It was such descriptions as 
these that supplied Shakespeare with his imagery, and which 
made our ancestors try to introduce the tree into England. 
But there seems to have been much difficulty in establishing 
it. Evelyn tried to introduce it, but did not succeed at first, 
and the tree is not mentioned in his “Sylva ” of 1664. It was, 
however, certainly introduced in 1676, when it appears, from 
the gardeners’ accounts, to have been planted at Bretby Park, 
Derbyshire (“Gardener’s Chronicle,” January, 1877). I believe 
this is the oldest certain record of the planting of the Cedar in 
England, the next oldest being the trees in Chelsea Botanic 
