CHAPTER XIII

PLINY SAIETH : CONCERNING ROSES AND GARLANDS
" Farewell ! dear flowers, sweetly your time ye spent, Fit while ye lived for smell or ornament, And after death, for cures."
— Religious Poems. GEORGE HERBERT.
OW frequently in reading the pages of Parkinson and Gerarde do we feel a comic resignation at the ever recur- rent words, " Pliny saieth," or " Let Pliny tell," " Pliny teacheth," " Pliny reason- eth." We weary of old Pliny's name ; but I must add, in truth, we never weary of old Pliny's words. Let us read those words con- cerning Roses, since they are twenty centuries old, and find what Roses were known and loved in those days of which we are ever eager to learn all details : in those most wonderful and sacred days of the New Tes- tament. Let us turn from the very respectable and easily handled edition of Pliny in the Bohn Library, and take down this vast folio, — companion in size and type and paper and binding of the great Herballs of Parkinson and Gerarde and Cole, — cumbersome
296
Concerning Roses and Garlands 297
and heavy to handle, it is true ; shedding, too, a leathery brown powder from its ancient calfskin jerkin, yet somehow, a book beloved. Here is the fine or- nate title-page, with its beautiful Printer's Mark, a delight to the eye, and the title, The Historic of the ) imprinted at London in 1 634. It is translated
Roses at Mount Vernon, the Home of George Washington.
by Dr. Philemon Holland, a worthy after Fuller's own heart, and a fit companion for the three Herb- Johns, who were his contemporaries, John Parkinson, John Gerarde, and John Evelyn. Fuller says, " Our Holland had the true knack of translating." The