[340] A very amusing little volume might be made on the romance of flowers, on the tales which poetry and fancy have invented to associate the affections and the mind with plants, thus adding the pleasures of the feelings and the imagination to those of the eye. The reader remembers the Love in Idleness, in Shakspeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. The Floure of Souvenance, the Forget-me-not, is an equally pleasing instance. The application of this name to the Myosotis Scorpioidis of botanists is of considerable antiquity: the story in the text proves that the plant with its romantic associations was known in England as early as the days of our Edward IV. The following tale of the origin of the fanciful name has been communicated to me by my friend Anthony Todd Thomson, whose Lectures on the Elements of Botany, at once scientific and popular, profound and elegant, take a high place in the class of our most valuable works. "Two lovers were loitering on the margin of a lake, on a fine summer's evening, when the maiden espied some of the flowers of Myosotis growing on the water, close to the bank of an island, at some distance from the shore. She expressed a desire to possess them, when her knight, in the true spirit of chivalry, plunged into the water, and, swimming to the spot, cropped the wished-for plant, but his strength was unable to fulfil the object of his achievement, and feeling that he could not regain the shore, although very near it, he threw the flowers upon the bank, and casting a last affectionate look upon his lady-love, he cried, 'Forget-me-not,' and was buried in the waters." "There are three varieties of the plant," Mr. Thomson adds; "the one to which the tradition of the name is attached is perennial, and grows in marshes and on the margins of lakes." [341] The Lord Scales was a right good knight of worship, in spite of the reflections on his courage which Edward IV. once threw out against him. "The kyng hathe sayd of hym that even wyr he hathe most to do, then the Lord Scalys wyll soonest axe leve to depart, and the kyng weenyth that it is mist because of kowardyese." Paston Letters, vol. iv. p. 116. [342] Rymer, Foedera, tom. ii. p. 573.