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'If those confounded kids are going to have mumps, he addressed his words apparently into the interior of the glass, 'it probably means the doctor, and the doctor means money, and I shan't be able to afford the Hortulus Animoe. I opened my ears. 'My husband goes stark staring mad sometimes, said Mrs Brindley to me. 'It lasts for a week or so, and pretty nearly lands us in the workhouse.
Vergil's companions in the Cecropius hortulus, destined to be his life-long friends, were, according to Probus, Quintilius Varus, the famous critic, Varius Rufus, the writer of epics and tragedies, and Plotius Tucca. Of his early friendship with Varius he has left a remembrance in Catalepton I and VII, with Varus in Eclogue VI. Horace combined all these names more than once in his verses.
This time it's the Hortulus Animoe. Do you know what it is? I don't. 'No, I said, and the prestige of the British Museum trembled. Then I had a vague recollection. 'There's an illuminated manuscript of that name in the Imperial Library of Vienna, isn't there? 'You've got it in one, said Mr Brindley. 'Wife, pass those walnuts. 'You aren't by any chance buying it? I laughed. 'No, he said.
Hardly pleased with the cumbersome mass of Carlovingian Latinists, the Alcuins and the Eginhards, he contented himself, as a specimen of the language of the ninth century, with the chronicles of Saint Gall, Freculfe and Reginon; with the poem of the siege of Paris written by Abbo le Courbe; with the didactic Hortulus, of the Benedictine Walafrid Strabo, whose chapter consecrated to the glory of the gourd as a symbol of fruitfulness, enlivened him; with the poem in which Ermold the Dark, celebrating the exploits of Louis the Debonair, a poem written in regular hexameters, in an austere, almost forbidding style and in a Latin of iron dipped in monastic waters with straws of sentiment, here and there, in the unpliant metal; with the De viribus herbarum, the poem of Macer Floridus, who particularly delighted him because of his poetic recipes and the very strange virtues which he ascribes to certain plants and flowers; to the aristolochia, for example, which, mixed with the flesh of a cow and placed on the lower part of a pregnant woman's abdomen, insures the birth of a male child; or to the borage which, when brewed into an infusion in a dining room, diverts guests; or to the peony whose powdered roots cure epilepsy; or to the fennel which, if placed on a woman's breasts, clears her water and stimulates the indolence of her periods.
"Walafrid Strabo, in his 'Hortulus, also speaks of the rose as the blood of the martyred saints," the Abbé Gévresin murmured. "'Rosae martyres, rubore sanguinis, according to the key of Saint Melito," the other priest added, in confirmation. "We will admit that shrub," cried Durtal. "Now for the lily "
This poem is of especial interest to me on account of the illustration it affords of a theory of my own concerning the unconsciousness of the true artist. For breaking away from the literary habitudes of his time, which were to do the gospels or the life of a favourite saint into hexameters, he wrote a poem, 'Hortulus, descriptive of the garden of the monastery.
'My wife never will understand, said Mr Brindley, 'that complete confidence between two human beings is impossible. 'I shall go out as a milliner, that's all, Mrs Brindley returned. 'Remember, the Dictionary of National Biography isn't paid for yet. 'I'm glad I forgot that, otherwise I shouldn't have ordered the Hortulus. 'You've not ORDERED it? 'Yes, I have.
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