274 
PLANT-LORE OF SHAKESPEARE 
Its use at weddings is pleasantly told in the old ballad of 
“ The Bride’s Good-morrow ”— 
“ The house is drest and garnisht for your sake 
With flowers gallant and green ; 
A solemn feast your comely cooks do ready make, 
Where all your friends will be seen : 
Young men and maids do ready stand 
With sweet Rosemary in their hand— 
A perfect token of your virgin’s life. 
To wait upon you they intend 
Unto the church to make an end : 
And God make thee a joyfull wedded wife.” 
Roxburghe Ballads , vol. i. 
It probably is one of the most lasting of evergreens after 
being gathered, though we can scarcely credit the statement 
recorded by Phillips, that “ it is the custom in France to put a 
branch of Rosemary in the hands of the dead when in the 
coffin, and we are told by Valmont Bomare, in his ‘ Histoire 
Naturelle,’ that when the coffins have been opened after 
several years, the plant has been found to have vegetated so 
much that the leaves have covered the corpse.” These were 
the general and popular uses of the Rosemary, but it was of 
high repute as a medicine, and still holds a place, though not 
so high as formerly, in the “Pharmacopoeia.” “Rosemary,” 
says Parkinson, “ is almost of as great use as Bayes, both for 
inward and outward remedies, and as well for civill as physicall 
purposes—inwardly for the head and heart, outwardly for the 
sinews and joynts ; for civile uses, as all do know, at weddings, 
funerals, &c., to bestow among friends; and the physicall are 
so many that you might as well be tyred in the reading as I in 
the writing, if I should set down all that might be said of it.” 
With this high character we may well leave this good, old- 
fashioned plant, merely noting that the name is popularly but 
erroneously supposed to mean the Rose of Mary. It has no 
connection with either Rose or Mary, but is the Ros marinus, 
or Ros Maris (as in Ovid—• 
“ Ros mans, et laurus, nigraque myrtus olent; ” 
De Arte A man., iii. 390), 
