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PLANT-LORE OF SHAKESPEARE 
knave and villain in the whole range of Shakespeare’s writings. 
It was the preaching of a deep hypocrite, and while we hate 
the preacher we thank him for his lesson. 1 
The Hyssop (.Hyssopus officinalis ) is not a British plant, but 
it was held in high esteem in Shakespeare’s time, Spenser 
spoke of it as— 
“ Sharp Isope good for green wounds remedies ”— 
and Gerard grew in his garden five or six different species or 
varieties. He does not tell us where his plants came from, 
and perhaps he did not know. It comes chiefly from Austria 
and Siberia; yet Greene in his “Philomela,” 1615, speaks of 
“the Hyssop growing in America, that is liked of strangers for 
the smell, and hated of the inhabitants for the operation, being 
as prejudicial to the one as delightsome to the other.” It is 
now very little cultivated, for it is not a plant of much beauty, 
and its medicinal properties are not much esteemed; yet it 
is a plant that must always have an interest to readers of the 
Bible; for there it comes before us as the plant of purification, 
as the plant of which the study was not beneath the wisdom 
of Solomon, and especially as the plant that added to the 
cruelties of the Crucifixion. Whether the Hyssop of Scripture 
is the Hyssopus officinalis is still a question, but at the present 
time the most modern research has decided that it is. 
1 It seems likely from the following passage from Lily’s “Euphues, the 
anatomy of wit,” 1617, that the plants were not named at random by Iago, 
but that there was some connection between them. “Good gardeners, 
in their curious knots, mixe Isope with Time, as aiders the one with the 
others ; the one being dry, the other moist.” The gardeners of the six¬ 
teenth century had a firm belief in the sympathies and antipathies of plants. 
