On the first publication of Hervey’s “Meditations and Contemplations,” and for several years afterwards, they were highly popular, and are still greatly admired by young persons, and others who are delighted by a florid interjectional manner of writing. Hervey’s work occurs in Mr. Bohn’s “Catalogue of the Library of the late reverend and learned Samuel Parr, LL.D.” with the following remarkable note attached to the volume—“This book was the delight of Dr. Parr, when he was a boy; and, for some time, was the model on which he endeavoured to form a style.”
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ARUM—CUCKOO-PINT—STARCH-WORT.
Old John Gerard, who was some time gardener to Cecil lord Burleigh, in the reign of queen Elizabeth, says, in his “Herbal,” that “beares, after they have lien in their dens forty dayes without any manner of sustenance, but what they get with licking and sucking their owne feet, do, as soon as they come forth, eate the herbe Cuckoo-pint, through the windie nature whereof the hungry gut is opened, and made fit againe to receive sustenance.”
Gerard further tells, that “the most pure and white starch is made of the roots of Cuckow-pint; but is most hurtful to the hands of the laundresse that hath the handling of it, for it choppeth, blistereth, and maketh the hands rough and rugged, and withall smarting.” From this ancient domestic use of the arum, it was called “Starch-wort:” it bore other and homelier names, some of them displeasing to a modern ear.
Gerard likewise relates of the arum, medically, that after being sodden in two or three waters, whereby it may lose its acrimony, and fresh put to, being so eaten, it will cut thick and tough humours in the chest and lungs; “but, then, that Cuckow-pint is best that biteth most—but Dragon’s is better for the same purpose.”
I know not whether I have fallen in with the sort of arum “that biteth most,” but, a summer or two ago, walking early in the afternoon through the green lanes to Willsden, and so to Harrow on the Hill, its scarlet granulations among the way-side browse and herbage, occasioned me to recollect the former importance of its root to the housewife, and from curiosity I dug up one to taste. The piece I bit off was scarcely the size of half a split pea, yet it gave out so much acrid milk, that, for more than an hour, my lips and tongue were inflamed and continued to burn, as if cauterized by hot iron; nor did the sensation wholly cease till after breakfast the next morning. Gerard says that, according to Dioscorides, “the root hath a peculiar virtue against the gout,” by way of cataplasm, blister-wise.
Hervey introduces the flower of the Cuckoo-pint as one of the beautiful products of the spring. “The hawthorn in every hedge is partly turgid with silken gems, partly diffused into a milk-white bloom. Not a straggling furze, nor a solitary thicket on the heath, but wears a rural nosegay. Even amidst that neglected dike the arum rises in humble state: most curiously shrouded in her leafy tabernacle, and surrounded with luxuriant families, each distinguished by a peculiar livery of green.” I am almost persuaded that I have seen the fruited arum among the ornaments of gothic architecture, surmounting pinnacles of delicate shrine-work.
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