PLANT-LORE OF SHAKESPEARE 
265 
most beautiful has on it the doom of decay and death. These 
were the lessons which even the heathen writers learned from 
their favourite Roses, and which Christian writers of all ages 
loved to learn also, not from the heathen writers, but from the 
beautiful flowers themselves. “ The Rose is a beautiful flower,” 
said St. Basil, “ but it always fills me with sorrow by reminding 
me of my sins, for which the earth was doomed to bear thorns.” 
And it would be easy to fill a volume, and it would not be a 
cheerless volume, with beautiful and expressive passages from 
poets, preachers, and other authors, who have taken the Rose 
to point the moral of the fleeting nature of all earthly things. 
Herrick in four lines tells the whole—• 
“ Gather ye Roses while ye may, 
Old time is still a-flying, 
And the same flower that smiles to-day 
To-morrow will be dying.” 1 
But Shakespeare’s notices of the Rose are not all emblem¬ 
atical and allegorical. He mentions these distinct sorts of 
Roses—the Red Rose, the White Rose, the Musk Rose, the 
Provengal Rose, the Damask Rose, the Variegated Rose, the 
Canker Rose, and the Sweet Brier. 
The Canker Rose is the wild Dog Rose, and the name is 
sometimes applied to the common Red Poppy. 
The Red Rose and the Provencal Rose (No. 13) are no 
doubt the same, and are what we now call R. centifolid, or the 
Cabbage Rose: a Rose that has been supposed to be a native 
of the South of Europe, but Dr. Lindley preferred “ to place 
its native country in Asia, because it has been found wild by 
Bieberstein with double flowers, on the eastern side of Mount 
Caucasus, whither it is not likely to have escaped from a 
garden.” 2 We do not know when it was introduced into 
1 See Spenser, F. ii, 12 ; 29. 
2 We have an old record of the existence of large double Roses in Asia 
by Herodotus, who tells us, that in a part of Macedonia were the so-called 
gardens of Midas, in which grew native Roses, each one having sixty petals, 
and of a scent surpassing all others (“ Hist.,” viii. 138). 
