I need say little of the uses of the Yew wood in furniture, nor of the many grand specimens of the tree which are scattered throughout the churchyards of England, except to say that "the origin of planting Yew trees in churchyards is still a subject of considerable perplexity. As the Yew was of such great importance in war and field sports before the use of gunpowder was known, perhaps the parsons of parishes were required to see that the churchyard was capable of supplying bows to the males of each parish of proper age; but in this case we should scarcely have been left without some evidence on the matter. Others again state that the trees in question were intended solely to furnish branches for use on Palm Sunday"[329:1] (_see_ PALM, p. 195), "while many suppose that the Yew was naturally selected for planting around churches on account of its emblematic character, as expressive of the solemnity of death, while, from its perennial verdure and long duration, it might be regarded as a pattern of immortality."--_Penny Magazine_, 1843. A good list of the largest and oldest Yews in England will be found in Loudon's "Arboretum." * * * * * The "dismal Yew" concludes the list of Shakespeare's plants and the first part of my proposed subject; and while I hope that those readers who may have gone with me so far have met with some things to interest them, I hope also they will agree with me that gardening and the love of flowers is not altogether the modern accomplishment that many of our gardeners now fancy it to be. Here are two hundred names of plants in one writer, and that writer not at all writing on horticulture, but only mentioning plants and flowers in the most incidental manner as they happened naturally to fall in his way. I should doubt if there is any similar instance in any modern English writer, and feel very sure that there is no such instance in any modern English dramatist. It shows how familiar gardens and flowers were to Shakespeare, and that he must have had frequent opportunities for observing his favourites (for most surely he was fond of flowers), not only in their wild and native homes, but in the gardens of farmhouses and parsonages, country houses, and noblemen's stately pleasaunces. The quotations that I have been able to make from the early writers in the ninth and tenth centuries, down to gossiping old Gerard, the learned Lord Chancellor Bacon, and that excellent old gardiner Parkinson, all show the same thing, that the love of flowers is no new thing in England, still less a foreign fashion, but that it is innate in us, a real instinct, that showed itself as strongly in our forefathers as in ourselves; and when we find that such men as Shakespeare and Lord Bacon (to mention no others) were almost proud to show their knowledge of plants and love of flowers, we can say that such love and knowledge is thoroughly manly and English.