It was past two o’clock when Eleanor Vane lay down, thoroughly exhausted, but not weary—she had one of those natures which seem never to grow weary—to fall asleep for the first time in four-and-twenty hours.
Her father did not quite so quickly fall into a peaceful slumber. He lay awake for upwards of an hour, tumbling and tossing to and fro upon the narrow spring mattress, and muttering to himself.
And even in his sleep, though the early summer dawn was gray in the room when he fell into a fitful and broken slumber, the trouble of his eldest daughter’s letter was heavy upon him, for every now and then he muttered, disjointedly,—
“Thief—swindler. As if—as if—I would—rob—my own daughter.”
A FALLEN FRUIT—THE QUINCE.
“What’s in a name?” said Shakspeare; and, in answering himself, he found among the flowers an illustration of its nothingness; yet do researches among fruits tend rather to induce the opposite conclusion, for while the accumulated glory of traditionary ages has gathered round one of our orchard fruits, although it has very limited pretensions thereto, simply because we call it by the venerable name of Apple; another, which has far greater claims to be honoured for the place it holds in the lore of antiquity, is yet commonly passed by, unnoticed and neglected, owing to the disguise of a modern appellation disconnecting it from the classical reminiscences with which it was once associated. Were Venus still surviving to find herself wholly neglected, while all her graces were attributed to some common-place belle of the season,—were Hercules still lingering upon earth to see himself shut out from the “ring,” and all his labours popularly supposed to have been achieved by some puny modern pugilist—then might the once renowned Quince find sympathising fellow-sufferers in the doom that has fallen upon it, degraded as it is from its former proud position as the golden apple for which even divinities contested, to be now the least known and least esteemed of all the pomal tribe. It does not profess to be the Scriptural “apple of gold,” that being identified with a more peculiarly Syrian product; it may not be the Hesperidean fruit of the earliest age of Greece, though in spite of opposing theories some have even attributed to it this honour; but there seems every reason to connect it with some at least of the numerous Greek legends in which golden apples so prominently figure: that it was the prize for which goddesses unveiled their charms before the shepherd of Mount Ida, and the attraction which stayed the speed of the swift-footed Atalanta. No other fruit then known answers so well to the description of these glittering treasures, and we can scarcely account otherwise for what is known to be a fact, viz., that among the ancients the quince was dedicated to Venus, and looked on as the emblem of happiness and love; the temples of Cyprus and Paphos were decorated with it; it was the special ornament of the statues of Hymen; the figure of Hercules, now in the Tuileries Gardens, is represented with this fruit in his hand; and, according to Plutarch, Solon made a law that it should form the invariable feast of the bridegroom (and some say of the bride, too,) before retiring to the nuptial couch.
A native of Greece, the quince grew more abundantly in the neighbourhood of Cydon in Crete (now Candia), deriving thence the name Cydonia, which is still continued as its botanical cognomen; and was thence taken to Rome, where, under the name of Cotonea (a reminiscence of which was preserved in its old English title of Melicotone), it was looked on as a sacred fruit, though, as regards mere secular uses, it seems to be more prized for its scent than its savour, the climate perhaps not bringing it to such perfection as it had attained in Greece, notwithstanding Columella particularly mentions that “quinces not only yield pleasure, but health,” alluding probably to their use in medicine. Pliny says that the varieties were numerous, and particularises four sorts, adding that all these “are kept shut up in the antechambers of great men, where they receive the visits of their courtiers: they are hung, too, upon the statues that pass the night with us in our chambers.”
How sad a decline from honours like these when a modern writer derives the French name of the fruit, coignassier, from the circumstance that its “disagreeable odour” usually causes it to be banished to a corner (coin) of the garden! It is not everywhere, however, that taste has thus changed, for Professor Targioni, an Italian writer on horticulture, says that, at the present day, it is much prized by the peasantry in some parts of the south of Europe, for perfuming their stores of linen; and, in yet warmer lands, it is still found as gratifying to the palate as to the nostrils; a recent traveller in the east stating that the quince of Persia ripens on the tree or after gathering, and losing all its austerity, and becoming like a soft ripe pear, is eaten at the dessert as a much prized delicacy, and yearly forwarded as presents to Bagdad, where the highly-perfumed odour is found so powerful that it is said, with perhaps a tinge of oriental exaggeration, that if there be but a single quince in a caravan, no one who accompanies it can remain unconscious of its presence.
Spreading from Italy almost throughout Europe, it now grows spontaneously in most countries of mild temperature; and, as Gerard informs us, was common in his early times, in the hedges of England; but never ripening here sufficiently to be eaten raw, and having lost, perhaps undeservedly, much of the repute which it enjoyed two or three centuries ago, on account of its medicinal properties, it is now very seldom met with, and many persons are to be found even among those who have been born and brought up in the country, who have never tasted, or perhaps as much as seen a quince.
More generally cultivated, wherever it does still claim the cultivator’s care, as a stock whereon to graft the pear, in order to dwarf the growth of that tree, or to hasten the ripening of its fruit, than for the sake of its own produce, the latter is yet capable of being turned to better account than