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PLANT-LORE OF SHAKESPEARE 
prunes, see plums. 
pumpxon. 
Go to, then. We’ll use this unwholesome humidity, this gross watery 
Pumpion .—Merry Wives of Windsor , iii. 3, 42. 
The old name for the Cucumber (in HSlfric’s “Vocabulary”) 
is hwer-hwette, i. e. wet ewer, but Pumpion, Pompion, and 
Pumpkin were general terms including all the Cucurbitacese 
such as Melons, Gourds, Cucumbers, and Vegetable Marrows. 
All were largely grown in Shakespeare’s days, but I should 
think the reference here must be to one of the large useless 
Gourds, for Mrs. Ford’s comparison is to Falstaff, and Gourds 
were grown large enough to bear out even that comparison. 
“ The Gourd groweth into any forme or fashion you would 
have it, . . . being suffered to clime upon an arbour where 
the fruit may hang; it hath beene seene to be nine foot long.” 
And the little value placed upon the whole tribe helped to bear 
out the comparison. They were chiefly good to “ cure copper 
faces, red and shining fierce noses (as red as red Roses), with 
pimples, pumples, rubies, and such-like precious faces.” This 
was Gerard’s account of the Cucumber, while of the Cucumber 
Pompion, which was evidently our Vegetable Marrow, and of 
which he has described and figured the variety which we now 
call the Custard Marrow, he says, “ it maketh a man apt and 
ready to fall into the disease called the colericke passion, and 
of some the felonie.” 
Mrs. Ford’s comparison of a big loutish man to an over¬ 
grown Gourd has not been lost in the English language, for 
“ bumpkin” is only another form of “Pumpkin,” and Mr. Fox 
Talbot, in his “English Etymologies,” has a very curious account 
of the antiquity of the nickname. “The Greeks,” he says, 
“ called a very weak and soft-headed person a Pumpion ; 
