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Thus, swine when affected with the spleen are supposed to resort to the spleen-wort, and according to Coles, in his "Art of Simpling," the ass does likewise, for he tells us that, "if the asse be oppressed with melancholy, he eates of the herbe asplemon or mill-waste, and eases himself of the swelling of the spleen."
Crollius wrote a work on the subject; and Langham, in his "Garden of Health," published in the year 1578, accepted the doctrine. Coles, in his "Art of Simpling" , thus describes it:
'How then, said he, 'for she was as dark-skinned as a dwarf, and thou so bright and fair? She said: 'Well, if the woods are good for nothing else, yet are they good for the growing of herbs, and I know the craft of simpling; and with one of these herbs had I stained my skin and my brother's also. And it showed the darker beneath the white coif.
To go simpling once more by field and wood and hedgerow would be a pleasant duty for country housewives to impose upon themselves; and as to the herbalists' observations on their virtues, we may say with old Coles, "Most of them I am confident are true, and if there be any that are not so, yet they are pleasant."
It pleases me to think of Henrietta Maria, in her exile, busying herself in her still-room, and forgetting her dangers and sorrows in simpling and stilling and kitchen messes; and of her devoted Sir Kenelm, in the moments when he is neither abeting her Royalist plots, nor diverting her mind to matters of high science, or the mysteries of the Faith, but bringing to her such lowlier consolations as are hinted in "Hydromel as I made it weak for the Queen Mother."
Coles, in his "Art of Simpling," for instance, informs us how, "they take likewise the roots of mandrake, according to some, or, as I rather suppose, the roots of briony, which simple folk take for the true mandrake, and make thereof an ugly image, by which they represent the person on whom they intend to exercise their witchcraft."
"Reliquiae Antiquse," Wright and Halliwell, i. 195; Quarterly Review, 1863, cxiv. 241. Coles, "The Art of Simpling," 1656. Anne Pratt's "Flowering Plants of Great Britain," iv. 9. Black's "Folk-medicine," p. 201. Folkard's "Plant-Lore Legends and Lyrics," p. 248. Fraser's Magazine, 1870, p. 591. "Plant-Lore Legends and Lyrics," p. 349. Black's "Folk-medicine," p. 185.
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