she has attained to marriageable age, decorates the window of her apartment with flowers. The Afghauns employ them as tokens, by which friends living at a distance may convey verbal messages to each other. A servant sent on such a mission will thus begin: "If you and my master were sitting by yourselves in a garden, and he told you that he had counted thirty-four different kinds of flowers within a few yards on the hills of Caubul, that is to be a sign to you that what I say comes from him." The tales of the East have frequent allusions to the intercourse carried on by the interchange of fruits, buds, flowers, spices, leaves, and petals; and Davies describes a similar custom among the ancient Britons.

In Solomon's pastoral, floral allegories are perpetual :

"Whither is my beloved gone, thou fairest among women? Whither is thy beloved turned aside, that we may seek him with thee? My beloved is gone to the beds of spices; to feed in the gardens; and to gather lilies."

"I went into the garden of nuts; to see the fruits of the valley; and to see whether the vine flourished, and the pomegranate budded."

The anemone blends its colours so harmoniously, that it is difficult to discover where one tint begins and another ends; the anemone may, therefore, be compared to deceit. But the tulip, changing its colours so abruptly that the different shades may easily be distinguished, might be called the flower of openness and honesty.

National badges are frequently derived from flowers: thus that of England is the rose; France has adopted the lily, Ireland the shamrock, and Scotland the thistle.

Horace has many allusions to the shortness of life, and the similar picture that flowers present. In the Winter's Tale, Perdita suits the flowers she dis

tributes to the ages of those to whom she presents them. To old men she gives rue and rosemary, which keep all the winter; to those of middle age she offers flowers of summer, such as lavender, mint, marjoram, and marigold; and to the young, oxlips, crown imperials, primroses, lilies, flowers-de-luce, daffodils, and violets. Horace compares youth to ivy and myrtle, and old age to dried leaves.

Boccalini has a story that ambassadors from all the gardeners in the world were sent to Apollo at Parnassus, to request him to grant them an instrument for the more effectual weeding of their gardens, which had become of late so full of henbane and other noxious plants, that the expense of keeping them clean absorbed all their profits. Finding no very great attention paid to their suit, they pressed it by reminding Apollo that he had granted drums and trumpets to princes, at the sound of which all the useless weeds of society were extirpated. They entreated him, therefore, to give them instruments which would have a similar effect in their gardens. "If princes," returned the god," could as easily discern the weeds of society as you can discern the weeds in your gardens, I should have given them only halters and axes for their instruments. But, since all men are made of the same materials, it is impossible among them to know the weeds from the flowers, as you can do; and therefore I cannot but esteem you not a little ridiculous in comparing the purging of the world from seditious spirits to the drawing of weeds out of a garden."

Floral Ornaments.-The designs that flowers have afforded to painting, sculpture, and architecture, with their effects upon the mind, are beautifully touched upon by the author of the "Spectacle de la Nature." In the manufacture of silks, as well as in the fine arts, flowers are adopted as giving the greatest variety, and the most vivid expression to a shawl, a robe, or a mantle. The practice is of great an

tiquity. Equally so is the custom of presenting silk ornaments, in which the flowers are interwoven or embroidered, to friends and persons of high consequence and rank. It prevailed in ancient Syria and Persia, and is still observed in India, Turkey, and Ethiopia. The passage in the Eneid, where Andromache presents to Ascanius a robe wrought with flowers of golden tissue, and requests him to accept it as a friendly gift from the wife of Hector to a youth in whom appeared the charms and graces of her lost Astyanax, is exceedingly beautiful.

Flowers are inwoven in the shawls of Cashmire; and the Chinese embroider all their works with the flowers and foliage of the shrub called Hai-Tang, much celebrated by their poets. The practice is imitated in the Gobelin tapestry and the Dresden china; and when Mons. de Boisgelin was in Denmark, a service of porcelain was preparing, on which were delineated all the plants of the Flora Botanica, classed and arranged according to the system of Linnæus.

Floral Honours.-In distributing rewards and in conferring honours, Nature is generally appealed to. Poets were crowned with bays, and conquerors with laurel; and of the ten kinds of bearings into which the art of heraldry is divided, seven consist of signs drawn from the natural world. When we would welcome a hero or a monarch, boughs are scattered in his path; and many of our ancient festivals were celebrated under an oak, the young women with nosegays in their hands, and the young men with oak-leaves in their hats.

In Salency, a small village in Picardy, there still remains an interesting custom. It is called "the festival of the rose." On a certain day of every year the young women of the village assemble. After a solemn trial before competent judges, that young woman who is found to have conducted herself the most discreetly, and gives the strongest

proofs of the general innocence and simplicity of her character, is decorated with a crown, which thenceforward becomes an object of pride to her whole family. This crown consists of a hat ornamented with roses. It frequently constitutes the whole wealth of the wearer; but instances are far from being unfrequent in which it has been esteemed the most honourable recommendation to a wealthy suiter. This festival was instituted by St. Medard, in the fifteenth century. He was the sole proprietor of the village, and his sister the fortunate winner of the first prize. To the time of the revolution this custom was observed with all the preparation and solemnity that marked its primary-institution three centuries before.

Flowers on Graves.-The Romans of rank were generally buried in their gardens or fields, near the public road. This custom Propertius seems not to have approved; since he desires his friends by no means to observe it in regard to himself, lest his shade should be disturbed by the noise of passengers; and Ausonius has a similar sentiment. The manner in which the Romans took leave of their dying friends was exceedingly affecting: "Vale, vale, vale! nos te ordine quo natura permiserit-cuncti sequemur.Farewell, farewell, farewell! in the order which nature permits, we shall all follow thee." Then, praying that the earth might lie lightly on their remains, they departed. Their monuments were afterward decorated with chaplets of the balsam-tree and garlands of flowers.

A similar practice prevailed in most ancient countries. The Persians adopted it from the Medes, the Greeks from the Persians, and Pythagoras introduced it into Italy. The tomb of Achilles was decorated with amaranth; the urn of Philopomen with chaplets; and that the grave of Sophocles was embellished with roses and ivy, we learn from an epitaph written by Simonides.

Virgil strews on the body of Pallas leaves of the arbutus and other funeral evergreens. The ceremony of laying the unfortunate youth upon his bier is extremely affecting; and the passage where he is compared to violets and hyacinths plucked by virgin hands, highly beautiful and pathetic.

Strew'd leaves and fun'ral greens the bier adorn;
All pale he lies, and looks a lovely flower,

New cropp'd by virgin hands, to dress the bower.

To this we may add, that few passages in that fine poem abound more in natural pathos than that where Andromache is represented as raising green altars to the memory of Hector; a passage reminding us of several in Ossian, where the poet describes the monuments erected to the heroes of remote ages: "O lay me, ye that see the light, near some rock of my hills; let the rustling oak be near; green be the place of my rest, and let the sound of the distant torrent be heard."

In the times of the ancient fathers, crowns of flowers were placed on the gravestones of virgins, and baskets of lilies, violets, and roses on the graves of husbands and wives.

The burying-places of the people of Morocco are generally situated in the fields, where every one purchases a spot of ground, which he surrounds with a walk and plants with flowers. In Java they scatter a profusion of flowers over the bodies of their friends, and the Afghans hang coronets and burn incense on their tombs, while the ghosts of the deceased are believed to sit at the head of their graves, invisible, enjoying the perfume.

In China, whence it is not improbable the custom originally passed into Media, Persia, and Arabia, the ceremony of planting flowers on graves still prevails. The mausoleums of the Crimean Khans, also, are generally shaded by shrubs and fruit-trees; and the