And again, in “3 Henry VI.” (iii. 1), King Henry, when in disguise, speaks thus:
“Thy place is fill’d, thy sceptre wrung from thee,
Thy balm wash’d off wherewith thou wast anointed:
No bending knee will call thee Cæsar now.”
The origin of balsam, says Mr. Ellacombe,[480] “was for a long time a secret, but it is now known to have been the produce of several gum-bearing trees, especially the Pistacia lentiscus and the Balsamodendron Gileadense, and now, as then, the name is not strictly confined to the produce of any one plant.”
Barley. The barley broth, of which the Constable, in “Henry V.” (iii. 5), spoke so contemptuously as the food of English soldiers, was probably beer,[481] which long before the time of Henry was so celebrated that it gave its name to the plant (barley being simply the beer-plant):
“Can sodden water,
A drench for sur-rein’d jades, their barley broth,
Decoct their cold blood to such valiant heat?”
Bay-tree. The withering and death of this tree were reckoned a prognostic of evil, both in ancient and modern times, a notion[482] to which Shakespeare refers in “Richard II.” (ii. 4):
“’Tis thought, the king is dead; we will not stay.
The bay-trees in our country are all wither’d”
—having obtained it probably from Holinshed, who says: “In this yeare, in a manner throughout all the realme of Englande, old baie trees withered.” Lupton, in his “Syxt Booke of Notable Things,” mentions this as a bad omen: “Neyther falling-sickness, neyther devyll, wyll infest or hurt one in that place whereas a bay-tree is. The Romaynes call it the plant of the good angel.”[483]
Camomile. It was formerly imagined that this plant grew the more luxuriantly for being frequently trodden or pressed down; a notion alluded to in “1 Henry IV.” (ii. 4) by Falstaff: “For though the camomile, the more it is trodden on the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears.” Nares[484] considers that the above was evidently written in ridicule of the following passage, in a book very fashionable in Shakespeare’s day, Lyly’s “Euphues,” of which it is a parody: “Though the camomile, the more it is trodden and pressed down, the more it spreadeth; yet the violet, the oftener it is handled and touched, the sooner it withereth and decayeth,” etc.
Clover. According to Johnson, the “honey-stalks” in the following passage (“Titus Andronicus,” iv. 4) are “clover-flowers, which contain a sweet juice.” It is not uncommon for cattle to overcharge themselves with clover, and die, hence the allusion by Tamora: