And in the preface Trevisa addresses his readers thus: "Merveyle not, ye witty and eloquent reders, that I thȳne of wytte and voyde of cunning have translatid this boke from latin to our vulgayre language as a thynge profitable to me and peradventure to many other, whych understonde not latyn nor have not the knowledge of the proprytees of thynges." The seventeenth book of _De Proprietatibus Rerum_ is on herbs and their uses, and it is full of allusions to the classical writers on herbs--Aristotle, Dioscorides and Galen--but the descriptions of the plants themselves are original and charming. There is no record to show that Bartholomew the Englishman was a gardener, but we can hardly doubt that the man who described flowers with such loving care possessed a garden and worked in it. The _Herbarius zu Teutsch_ might have been written in a study, but there is fresh air and the beauty of the living flowers in Bartholomew's writings. Of the lily he says: "The Lely is an herbe wyth a whyte floure. And though the levys of the floure be whyte yet wythen shyneth the lyknesse of golde." Bartholomew may have known nothing of the modern science of botany, but he knew how to describe not only the lily, but also the atmosphere of the lily, in a word-picture of inimitable simplicity and beauty. One feels instinctively that only a child or a great man could have written those lines. And is there not something unforgettable in these few words on the unfolding of a rose--"And whāne they [the petals] ben full growen they sprede theymselues ayenst the sonne rysynge"?