In the same country, an act of homage, unique in its kind, was paid to a lady in the early part of the seventeenth century. The Duke of Montausier, on obtaining the promise of the hand of Mademoiselle de Rambouillet, sent to her, according to custom, every morning till that fixed for the nuptials, a bouquet composed of the finest flowers of the season. But this was not all: on the morning of New Year’s Day, 1634--the day appointed for the marriage--he laid upon her dressing-table a magnificently-bound folio volume, on the parchment leaves of which the most skilful artists of the day had painted from nature a series of the choicest flowers cultivated at that time in Europe. The first poets of Paris contributed the poetical illustrations, which were written by the cleverest penmen under the different flowers. The most celebrated of these madrigals, composed by Chapelain on the Crown Imperial, represented that superb flower as having sprung from the blood of Gustavus Adolphus, who fell in the battle of Lützen; and thus paid, in the name of the Swedish hero, a delicate compliment to the bride, who was a professed admirer of his character. According to a statement published some years since, this magnificent volume, which was called, after the name of the lady, the Garland of Julia, was disposed of, in 1784, at the sale of the Duke de la Vallière’s effects, for fifteen thousand five hundred and ten livres (about £650), and was brought to England. The floral emblems of Shakspeare are evidence of the great poet’s fondness for flowers and his delicate appreciation of their uses and similitudes. In ‘A Winter’s Tale,’ Perdita is made to present appropriate flowers to her visitors, symbolical of their various ages; but the most remarkable of Shakspeare’s floral symbols occur where poor Ophelia is wearing, in her madness, “fantastic garlands of wild flowers”--denoting the bewildered state of her faculties. The order of these flowers runs thus, with the meaning of each term beneath:-- CROW FLOWERS. NETTLES. DAISIES. LONG PURPLES. Fayre Mayde. Stung to the Her Virgin Under the cold Quick. Bloom. hand of Death. “A fair maid, stung to the quick; her virgin bloom under the cold hand of death.” Probably no wreath could have been selected more truly typifying the sorrows of this beautiful victim of disappointed love and filial sorrow. The most noted code of floral signs, used as a language by the Turkish and Greek women in the Levant, and by the African females on the coast of Barbary, was introduced into Western Europe by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and La Mortraie, the companion in exile of Charles XII., and obtained in France and England much popularity as the “Turkish Language of Flowers.” This language is said to be much employed in the Turkish harems, where the women practise it, either for the sake of mere diversion in their seclusion, or for carrying on secret communication.