mented by doubts concerning the mother of our Lord; and at last, knowing that a brother of his Order, named Egidius, was of great renown for sanctity and for divine illumination, he determined to lay his difficulty before him. Brother Egidius, foreknowing both his coming and the object of it, set out to meet the Master; and as he approached, striking the ground with his staff, he exclaimed 'O Master of the Preachers! Virgo ante partum!" and immediately, on the spot which he had stricken, there sprang out of the earth a single lily flower, whiter than snow. Again Brother Egidius struck with his staff, saying, ' O doubting Master! Virgo in partu!' and a second lily appeared; and again he struck, with the words, 'O my brother! Virgo post partum!' and a third lily sprang up to illustrate the miracle and to confirm the faith of the Master. The story is appropriately assigned to the Dominicans, who in their origin were so closely connected with the great burst of devotion to the Virgin Mary which characterised the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries. It is to this period that most of the English Lady chapels' belong, and from this time the lily appears as a striking architectural ornament. The Cistercians, especially, who, not less than the children of St. Domenic, regarded the Virgin as their patroness, adopted this emblem in their churches; and their 'carved work of open lilies' still graces with its mournful beauty the ruined aisles and cloisters of Fountains, of Rievaulx, and of Kirkstall. The Cistercians, indeed, had their own story of the lily. There was a brother of their Order so rude and so unlettered that he could be taught nothing, and could retain nothing in his memory beyond the 'Ave Maria' of the angelical salutation. But this he repeated incessantly. At last he died; and from his grave there sprang up a lily of pure gold, with the words Ave Maria' traced on every leaf. Although it would be impossible to find a more beautiful or striking emblem of the Virgin than the lily, it has a far higher value for us from the fact that it was a flower of this kind to which our Lord referred in the sermon on the Mount. Could we determine with any certainty the exact species on which the glance of our blessed Lord fell when He bade His hearers' consider the lilies of the field,' there is surely no flower in the world which we should regard with equal interest. But this is not easy. The plains westward of the lake of Gennesareth, which surround the Mount of Beatitudes,' are covered, at different seasons of the year, with liliaceous flowers of many kinds, nearly all of which are brightly coloured. Pococke saw tulips *Magnum Speculum Exemplorum,' quoted by Dr. Rock, Church of the Fathers,' iii. 247. growing growing wild in great numbers, and conjectured that they were the 'lilies of Solomon.' Sir J. E. Smith thought the plant was the Amaryllis lutea, whose golden flowers cover the fields of the Levant in autumn; but later travellers are disposed to regard the Chalcedonian, or scarlet Martagon lily, as having been that referred to by our Lord. This, which was formerly known as the lily of Byzantium,' is found from the Adriatic to the Levant, and is most abundant throughout the district of Galilee, where almost the only plant which disputes the pre-eminence with it is the rhododendron. It is, moreover, in blossom precisely at that season of the year (the early summer) when the sermon on the Mount is generally thought to have been spoken; and its tall pyramids of scarlet flowers brighten the plain with such touches of strong colour as are visible at a great distance, and might fitly suggest a comparison with the royal robes of Solomon. The great gardeners of former days-Benedictine and Cistercian, monk and nun-looked upon the lily of the valley as the true 'flower of the field.' Although it now grows wild in many parts of England, it is not a native, and may have been introduced from Southern Europe by some Brother 'Pacificus,' whom we may picture to ourselves as tending the plant with loving care in the garden of his monastery, and watching reverently for the first unfolding of its blossoms. Like the great white lily, the lily of the valley was especially dedicated to the Virgin, and the folk-lore which surrounds it in England is always connected with purity and holiness. It grows freely in some parts of St. Leonard's Forest in Sussex, and is there said to have sprung from the blood of St. Leonard, who once fought in the forest for three successive days with a mighty worm or 'firedrake.' Although at last victorious, the saint was severely wounded in the struggle, and wherever his blood fell to the ground lilies of the valley sprang up in profusion. The rose, it need hardly be said, is as much an emblem of the Virgin as the lily, with which latter flower the rose of Sharon is united in the text already quoted. Yet it is doubtful, not only whether the original word is here rightly translated 'rose,' but whether the rose is mentioned at all in any part of the sacred volume. The oleander and the rhododendron are, no doubt, the true plants in many places where the English translation uses the word rose; and the rose of Sharon is, in all probability, the large, single yellow Narcissus-a flower common in Palestine, and one that has always been highly esteemed in the East. 'He who has two cakes of bread,' Mahomed is reported to have said, 'let him sell one of them for some flowers of the Narcissus; for bread is the food of the body, but narcissus is the food of the soul.' soul.' Venerable, however, as is the renown of the Narcissusthe antique flower-crown of the 'great goddesses' μεγάλαιν θεαῖν ἀρχαῖον στεφάνωμ' ... we are hardly disposed to recognise it as a rival of the rose, least of all in a country which displays the rose as its emblem. The rose of England' can hardly, we believe, trace itself higher than the days of the great wars, which 6 'Sent, between the red rose and the white, A thousand souls to death and deadly night.' But, ages before the brawl in the Temple Gardens, the flower had been connected with one of the most ancient names of our island. The elder Pliny, in discussing the etymology of the word Albion, suggests that the land may have been so named from the white roses (ob rosas albas) which abounded in it.* Whatever we may think of the etymological skill displayed in the suggestion, the words call up a picture of the great Roman encyclopædist in earnest talk with some master of legions newly returned from Britain-it may be, with Vespasian himself—and plying him with eager questions about the woods of the remote province, under whose branches his troops had so often rested. We look with almost a new pleasure on the roses of our own hedgerows, when regarding them as descended in a straight line from therosas albas' of those far-off summers. The northern portal of the cathedral at Upsal is covered with sculptured roses, which Scheffer, the historian of the place, thought were intended as a recognition of the fact that the first preachers of Christianity in the North had come from England.† But he need hardly have gone so far afield. The rose has always been an ecclesiastical emblem, and in heathen days it was a mystic flower in both Germany and Scandinavia. The apse of the venerable cathedral of Hildesheim is nearly covered by a wild rose, the roots of which are within the crypt. It was, says the tradition, growing on the spot before the foundations of the church were laid by Charlemagne ; and it lays claim, accordingly, to an antiquity of more than a thousand years. We are, perhaps, fairly entitled to conclude that the present tree is the representative of a long line of ancestors which may have flourished here before the days of St. Boniface, and have marked Hildesheim as a sacred site to be Christianized by the erection of a church. For the rose was under the special protection of dwarfs and elves, who *Albion insula sic dicta ab albis rupibus quas mare alluit, vel ob rosas albas quibus abundat.'-Hist. Nat., iv. 16. Scheffer, Upsalia Antiqua,' p. 173. were were ruled so the Heldenbuch tells us-by their mighty king Laurin, the lord of the Rose Garden : 'Four portals to the garden lead, and when the gates are closed No living wight dare touch a rose, 'gainst his strict command opposed; Whoe'er would break the golden gates, or cut the silken thread, Is not King Laurin the enchanted prince of Beauty and the Beast,' of whose roses we have all heard? The rose, however, sprung from the blood of Adonis, was the flower of Aphrodite before the Dwarf King had planted his mysterious garden. A new origin was devised for it in Christian times; and Lord Lindsay has quoted the legend as an example of the infinite superiority of the Christian symbolism of mute nature' to that of the elder world. It was when a holy maiden of Bethlehem, 'blamed with wrong and slandered,' was doomed to death by fire, that, says Sir John Mandeville, 'she made her prayers to our Lord that he would help her, as she was not guilty of that sin.' Then the fire was suddenly quenched, and the burning brands became red roseres,' and the brands that were not kindled white 'roseres' full of roses. 'And theise weren the first roseres and roses, bothe white and red, that ever any man saughe.' Henceforth the rose became the flower of martyrs. It was a basket of roses that the martyr-saint Dorothea sent to the notary Theophilus from the garden of Paradise; and roses, said the romance, sprang up over all the field of Roncevaux, where Roland and the 'douze pairs' had stained the soil with their blood. As an emblem of the Virgin, the rose, both white and red, appears at a very early period; and it was especially so recognised by St. Domenic, when he instituted the devotion of the rosary with direct reference to the life of St. Mary. The prayers appear to have been symbolised as roses. There is a story of a 'lordsman, who had gathered much goods of his lord's,' and who had to pass with his treasure through a wood in which thieves were waiting for him. When he entered the wood, he remembered that he had not that day said 'Our Lady's saulter; and, as he knelt to do so, the Virgin came and placed a garland on his head, and at each Ave she set a rose in the garland that was so bryghte that all the wood shone thereof.' He * Heldenbuch, s. iv., 'The Garden of Roses.' The lines in the text-retaining the antique roughness of the original-are from a translation of part of the Heldenbuch, contributed by Sir Walter Scott to Jamieson and Weber's 'Northern Antiquities.' + Travels of Sir John Mandeville,' p. 70. was was himself ignorant of it; but the thieves saw the vision, and allowed him to pass unharmed.* The Virgin, as we have seen, succeeded Freyja in the 'calendar' of Northern flowers. The two 'white' gods of Valhalla -Baldur and Heimdallr-both of whom represent the sun, and whose peculiar epithet referred to the dazzling brightness of sunlight, were replaced in a similar manner by St. John the Baptist, whose midsummer festival is marked, all over Europe, by so many remains of solar worship. He is himself called White Saint John' in some old German and Gallic calendars. Flowers with large sun-shaped discs, either white or golden-yellow, were dedicated to Baldur, as the sun-god; † and it was in this manner that the hypericum became the peculiar property of St. John; and, as the fuga dæmonum,' was so powerful in repelling the works of darkness; 'Trefoil, vervain, John's wort, dill, One species of St. John's wort (Hypericum quadrangulare, or perforatum) has its leaves pierced with minute holes, which are said to have been made by the devil with a needle, just as Baldur was pierced with the mistletoe by Loke. The root, too, is marked with red spots, still called Baldur's blood' in some parts of Norway, but generally said to be the blood of St. John,' and to appear always on the day of his beheading (August 29). The old Northern name of the great horse daisy was Baldur's brow;' and this, with many other species of chrysanthemum, all with white or golden flowers, became also dedicated to St. John. The attributes of the Baptist, however, are sometimes shared in a remarkable manner by St. John the Evangelist; and the golden sunflowers,' as these chrysanthemums were formerly called (the plant now known by that name is an importation from Peru), are occasionally introduced in representations of the latter saint with singular beauty and fitness. Thus, in stained glass of the twelfth century, filling a window in the apse of St. Remi, at Rheims, the Virgin and St. John appear on either side of the cross, the heads of both encircled by aureoles, hing sunflowers in their outer circles. The flowers are turned toward the Saviour on the cross, as toward their true 'sun.' The marygold—one of the Virgin's flowers-is itself a chrysanthemum. St. John appropriated the flowers of light and sunshine. The hammer-wielding Thor, who fought with the frost giants, is replaced by St. Olaf, St. George, or St. Michael, all of whom * The Festivall,' Rouen, 1499, quoted by Dr. Rock. fought |