[Aside.] Now, what a thing it is to be an ass!
Here’s no sound jest: the old man hath found their guilt,
And sends them weapons wrapp’d about with lines,
That wound, beyond their feeling, to the quick.”
Several of the Emblem writers, however, propound a sentiment not so generally known, in which Apollo’s favourite tree, the Laurel, is the token of a soul unalarmed by threatening evils. Sambucus and Whitney so consider it, and illustrate it with the motto,—The pure conscience is man’s laurel tree.
Conſcientia integra, laurus.
Sambucus, 1564.
The saying rests on the ancient persuasion that the laurel is the sign of joy, victory and safety, and that it is never struck even by the bolts of Jove. Sambucus, personifying the laurel, celebrates its praise in sixteen elegiac lines beginning,—