“Truly I am entitled to the name, since our first ancestors were as the lilies of the field, who toiled not, neither did they spin, hence it came that they left me nothing.”
“But thou wilt leave a lordly heritage,” replied the nobleman, smiling; “the glory of a great name which shall honour all thy fellow-citizens, and which will ever remain in the shield as the flower of Florence.” [182]
This is a pretty tale, though it turns on a pun, and has nothing more than that in it. Much has been written to prove that the lilies in the shields of France and Florence and on the ends of sceptres are not lilies, but there can be no reasonable doubt of its Latin symbolical origin. Among the Romans the lily was the emblem of public hope, of patriotic expectation, hence we see Roman coins with lilies bearing the mottoes: Spes Publica, Spes Augusta, Spes Populi Romani, and Virgil himself, in referring to Marcellus, the presumed heir to the throne of Augustus, makes Anchises cry: “Bring handfuls of lilies!”
This did not occur to me till after translating the foregoing little tradition, and it is appropriate enough to suggest that it may have had some connection with the tale. The idea of its being attached to power, probably in reference to the community governed, was ancient and widely spread. Not only was the garment of the Olympian Jupiter adorned with lilies, [183a] but the old German Thor held in one hand the lightning and in the other a lily sceptre [183b] indicating peace and purity, or the welfare of the people. The lily was also the type of purity from its whiteness, the origin of which came from Susanna the Chaste, who during the Babylonian captivity remained the only virgin. Susan is in Hebrew Shusam, which means a lily. “This was transferred to the Virgin Mary.” Hence the legend that Saint Ægidius, when the immaculateness of the Virgin was questioned, wrote in sand the query as to whether she was a maid before, during, and after the Conception, whereupon a lily at once grew forth out of the sand, as is set forth in a poem by the German Smetz—of which lily-legends of many kinds there are enough to make a book as large as this of mine.
The cult of the lily in a poetical sense was carried to a great extent at one time. The Dominican P. Tommaso Caraffa, in his “Poetiche Dicerie,” or avowed efforts at fine writing, devotes a page of affected and certainly florid Italian to the “Giglio,” and there are Latin poems or passages on it by Bisselius, P. Laurent le Brun, P. Alb. Ines, given by Gandutius (“Descriptiones Poeticæ”), Leo Sanctius and A. Chanutius. There is also a passage in Martial eulogizing the flower in comparing to it the white tunic given to him by Parthenio:
“Lilia tu vincis, nec adhuc dilapsa ligustra,
Et Tiburtino monte quod albet ebur.
Spartanus tibi cedit color, Paphiæque columna
Cedit Erithræis eruta gemma vadis.”
I saw once upon a time in Venice a magnificent snow-white carpet covered with lilies—a present from the Sultan to the well-known English diplomat and scholar, Layard—to which it seems to me that those lines of the Latin poet would be far more applicable than they could have been to what was in reality about the same as an ordinary clean shirt or blouse—for such was in fact the Roman tunic. It must, however, be candidly admitted that he does good service to humanity who in any way renders romantic, poetic, or popular, clean linen or personal purity of any kind.
VIRGIL AND THE BEAUTIFUL LADY OF THE LILY.
“Ecce tibi viridi se Lilia candice tollunt,
Atque humiles alto despactant vertice flores
Virginea ridente coma.”P. Laurence le Brun, El. 50, 1. 7.
Once the Emperor went hunting, when he heard a marvellously sweet voice as of a lady singing, and all his dogs, as if called, ran into the forest.