92 
PLANT-LORE OF SHAKESPEARE 
fern. 
Gadshill. We have the receipt of Fern-seed—we walk invisible. 
Chamberlain. Now, by my faith, I think you are more beholden to the 
night than to Fern-seed for your walking invisible. 
\st Henry IV, ii. i, 95. 
There is a fashion in plants as in most other things, and in 
none is this more curiously shown than in the estimation in 
which Ferns are and have been held. Now-a-days it is the 
fashion to admire Ferns, and few would be found bold enough 
to profess an indifference to them. But it was not always so. 
Theocritus seems to have admired the Fern— 
“ Like Fern my tresses o’er my temples streamed .”—Idyll xx. ( Calverley .) 
“ Come here and trample dainty Fern and Poppy blossom.” 
Idyll v. {Calverley.) 
But Virgil gives it a bad character, speaking of it as “ filicem 
invisam.” Horace is still more severe, “ neglectis urenda filix 
innascitur agris.” The Anglo-Saxon translation of Boethius 
spoke contemptuously of the “Thorns, and the Furzes, and 
the Fern, and all the weeds ” (Cockayne). And so it was in 
Shakespeare’s time. Butler spoke of it as the—■ 
“Fern, that vile, unuseful weed, 
That grows equivocably without seed.” 
Cowley spoke the opinion of his day as if the plant had 
neither use nor beauty—• 
“ Nec caulem natura mihi, nec FI oris honorem, 
Nec mihi vel semen dura Noverca dedit— 
Nec me sole fovet, nec cultis crescere in hortis 
Concessum, et Foliis gratia nulla meis— 
Ilerba invisa Deis poteram coeloque videri, 
Et spurio Terrse nata puerperio.”— Plantarum, lib. i. 
And later still Gilpin, who wrote so much on the beauties of 
country scenery at the close of the last century, has nothing 
better to say for Ferns than that they are noxious weeds, to be 
classed with “Thorns and Briers, and other ditch trumpery.” 
The fact, no doubt, is that Ferns were considered something 
