42 
SHAKESPEARE'S GARDEN 
Pyrenees ; not only this, but L. spectabile also, and 
the scarlet martagon (A. chalcedonicum, L.), brought 
us from Western Asia, and the yellow-spotted lily of 
the Pyrenees (L. Pyrcenaicum, L.), a martagon with 
strangely foetid smell. All these remain what they 
were then—garden favourites. More than twenty 
times over our poet mentions the lily, .usually in 
metaphor. One or two examples to show the method 
of the master s treatment must perforce suffice us 
here. Thus, in Loves Labour s Lost , V. ii. 351, the 
Princess protests : 
Now by my maiden honour, yet as pure 
As the unsullied lily ; 
and in the superb benediction on the baby Elizabeth 
the Archbishop ends : 
But she must die, 
She must, the saints must have her ; yet a virgin, 
A most unspotted lily shall she pass 
To the ground, and all the world shall mourn her. 
Henry VIII., V. v. 60. 
Turning from the sublime to the ludicrous, we get 
the Pyramus and Thisbe scene, where Thisbe 
addresses Pyramus in these words : 
Dead, dead ? A tomb 
Must cover thy sweet eyes. 
These lily lips, 
This cherry nose, 
These yellow cowslip cheeks, 
Are gone, are gone. 
Midsummer-Night's Dream , V. i. 335. 
Such other flowers as occur this month we may 
take in alphabetical order, beginning with the 
poisonous yet elegant aconite, a plant of stately 
grace and curious anomalous flower structure, most 
puzzling to the botanical tyro, who would never 
dream it a near ally of the buttercup. So curious is 
the flower that it gives to the plant more than one ot 
