20 INTRODUCTION. 
May-day festivities are now falling rapidly into disuse ; but 
in ancient times it was celebrated as was fitting by the young. 
They rose shortly after midnight, and went to some neighbour¬ 
ing wood, attended by songs and music, there breaking green 
branches from the trees, and making nosegays, wreaths, and 
crowns of flowers. They returned home at the rising of the sun, 
and made their windows and their doors gay with garlands. 
In the villages they danced during the day round the May-pole, 
which afterward remained th^ whole year untouched, except 
by the seasons, a fading emblem, and a consecrated offering to 
the goddess of flowers.” Chaucer, in his conclusion of the 
Court of Love, hath described the feast of May. 
Forth goth all the court, both most and least, 
To fetch the floures fresh, and braunch and blome.— 
And namely hawthorn brought both page and grome, 
And then rejoysen in their great delite, 
Eke ech at others threw the floures bright, 
The primrose, violete, and the gold, 
With fresh garlants party blue and white. 
To pass, however, more immediately to the contents of this 
work, we would observe, that the sentimental language of 
Flora is by no means of modern invention. “ The hiero¬ 
glyphics of the ancient Egyptians abound in floral symbols, 
and from hence we may surmise that the Greeks became ac¬ 
customed to this figurative language. Their poetical fables 
are full of the metamorphoses of their deities into plants; 
indeed, there was no flower to which their imaginations had 
not affixed some meaning; even to this day a young Arcadian 
is seldom seen without his turban full of flowers, presented to 
him by the beauty he admires, by the silent language of which 
his hopes are kept alive ; and it forms one of the chief amuse¬ 
ments of the Greek girls to drop these symbols of their esteem 
