"As the base Hemlock were we such
The poysoned'st weed that grows,
Till Cynthia by her god-like touch
Transform'd us to the Rose."
It is possible that some confusion between the word sage = wise, good, which comes to us through the French from sapius, and sage, the aromatic plant, which is in Latin salvia, may have led to the latter being accepted as an emblem of wisdom and prudence. If so the giving of it by a lady to her love, "to show his sov'reignty in all," certainly betokened her possession of the sageness and discernment which should characterise one who—
"If she rules him, never shows she rules."
What Drayton meant when he wrote "July flower" I cannot pretend to decide: I incline to think that he meant what Shakespeare did by "gillyvors";[1] and seeing that Warwickshire men and the folk of many other counties call wallflower (Cheiranthus cheiri) gilly-flower at this day, I thought, until not very long ago, that the inference was plain. But then the wallflower can hardly be called the blossom of July, and one ought to bow before the opinion expressed in the Dictionary of English Plant-Names (with which Messrs. Britten and Holland have enriched the English Dialect Society), that Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare's gillyvors were a small kind of carnation, and that it was only later writers who transplanted the name to stocks and wallflowers. Drayton, himself, seems to confirm this by writing:[2]
"The curious clove July-flower,
Whose kinds hight the carnation
For sweetness of most sovereign power,
Shall help my wreath to fashion."
I know not whether he invented the name July-flower, but whether he did, or another did, it is a fine specimen of what the fashion of the day calls folk-etymology, being an attempt to make something
- ↑ The Winter's Tale, act iv. sc. 3, "Our carnations and sweet gillyvors."
- ↑ Muses Elysium, Nymph. v. [iv. 1487]; see also Pol. xv. [iii. 946]:
"The brave carnation then of sweet and sovereign power,
So of his colour called although a July flower."
