Flowers in Books

Wild Flowers in Literature. By Vernon Rendall. (The Seholart is

Press. 2s. 6d.)

THE compiler of a book of this sort needs to be either a very bold or a very philosophical man. Either he must challenge expert and fastidious criticism, or, with a fine indifference, must toss his random gleanings to the facile delectation of the amateur. His book, in fact, must take its stand either upon erudition or upon charm. The danger, obviously, lies in falling between the two stools. It is a danger which Mr. !tendrill has not avoided with indisputable success.

He will no doubt cherish a grudge against the captious reviewer more concerned with pointing out omissions than with appreciating inclusions and discoveries. Every reviewer has his pet points of information or pedantry from whose exhibition, being human, he cannot refrain. Thus I imme- diately find my pen asking, independently of ,my own ntore amicable intentions, why Mr. Rendall should have Omitted

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from his anthology a section on literary coincidences (or. should I call them borrowings ?) which happen to be familiar personally to me ? I wonder, for instance, how he could have resisted the temptation of pointing out the parallel between Lady Winchilsea's combination of : "Now the Jonquil o'erconea the feeble brain. We faint beneath the aromatic pain," and her other .couplet : "Nor will in fading silks compose Faintly the inimitable rose,' and Pope's distilment of those two couplets : • " Die of a rose in aromatic pain ; " or between Marlowe's :

"I drank of poppy and cold mandrake juice," and its great echo in Othello (which Mr. Rendall quotes) :

Not poppy, nor mandragora, Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world . . ."

or between Shelley's : "Nepenthe, Moly, Amaranth . . ."

and Tennyson's : " Propt on beds of amaranth and moly," and then querulously I inquire why, when he devotes a

section to foxgloves, he should have missed Keats' lovely line:

"Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell."

Equally I find it difficult to disCover the system on which he has worked. His allusions to literatures other than our own are, for one thing, extremely scrappy. Then, again, has he intentionally excluded living English authors such as Mr. Blunden and IV. H. Davies, and, if so, why has he relaxed his rule in favour of the Poet Laureate, Colonel Buchan, A. E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling and W. W. Gibson ?

Again, I cannot find myself in agreement with his recurrent

taste for Alfred Austin, T. E. Brown, and the author of The Roadmender. It is all rather pt:z-ding.

One is driven to the conclusion that Mr. Rendall in the course of his reading has kept a pleasant but rather' incom-

plete and indiscriminate card-index. One concludes that whenever in the course of his reading he -has come across an allusion to some flower or other, he has jotted it down, with a view to making a book some day out of his jottings. The result is sketchy and -deficient, but agreeable so far-as it goes. The reader is furnished with interesting bits of information, such as that in Spenser's day a species of green primrose flourished in the neighbourhood of London, and with amusing anecdotes, such as the one about Landor, who, having thrown his cook out of the window in a fit of anger, exclaimed, "Good God ! I forgot the violets." All this makes pleasant reading for a wet day, but leaves one with the impression that the subject might be treated again, more comprehensively and more fastidiously, either by Mr. Rendall himself or by some