Of a Singular Good Cure for Melancholy

IT stood among my great-great-grandfather’s books on the topmost library shelf, wedged in between The American Preceptor and The Journal of Thomas Chalkley. I had climbed up for a word with that “gentlest of skippers,” and in taking him down, had displaced the small brown volume, from whose leaves dropped out a faded purple flower. As I slipped the flower in again, I read upon the page where it was to lie for perhaps another hundred years: —

The Melancholy Thistle

“It riseth up with tender, single hoary green stalks, bearing thereon four or five green leaves, slightly dented above the edges. The points thereof are little or nothing prickly. They grow in many moist meadows of this land. They flower about July and August. It is under Capricorn, and therefore under both Saturn and Mars; one rids melancholy by sympathy, the other by antipathy. Their virtues are but few but these are not to be despised; for the decoction of the thistle in wine being drank expels superfluous melancholy and maketh a man as merry as a cricket. Superfluous melancholy causes care, fear, madness, despair, envy and many evils more beside, but religion teacheth us to wait on God’s providence. Dioscorides saith the root borne about one doth the like and removes all diseases of melancholy. Modern writers laugh at him. Let them laugh that win. My opinion is, that it is the best remedy against all melancholy diseases that grows; they that please to use it.”

So stout an indifference to modern prejudices concerning the wisdom of the ancients, and the number of the pronoun, invited to further acquaintance. Who was this quaint thistle-monger, bold to appropriate the advice that Margaret gave to Beatrice, — this melancholy anatomist, less occupied with his symptoms than with their cure ?

CULPEPPER’S FAMILY PHYSICIAN

The English Physician

An Astrologico-Physical Discourse of the vulgar Herbs of this nation whereby a man may preserve his body in health or cure himself with such things only as grow in America, they being most fit for American bodies.

Revised, Corrected and Enlarged by James Scammon.

Thus, and much more, the title-page.

To wander down between the narrow columns of the index is like walking through the fragrant rows of an old-fashioned English garden. Here bloom cowslip, motherwort, and turnsole, with gillyflower and gooseberry-bush, ivy, germander and pellitory-of-the-wall. “Such things only as grow in America,” Mr James Scammon? Or is the English Physician revised no farther than his titlepage, since “Burnet groweth in divers counties of this island, especially in Northamptonshire, as also near London by Pancras Church and by a causey-side in the middle of a field by Paddington.” “Hyssop is found among the bogs on Hampstead Heath.” “Juniper is plentiful on Finchley Common,” and “Winter Rocket aboundeth in divers places and particularly in the next pasture to the Conduit-head behind Gray’s Inn that brings water to Mr. Lamb’s Conduit in Holborn.”

One wonders if Mr. Pepys did not idly stoop to pluck a handful of the yellow blossoms as he loitered in Gray’s Inn Fields with the “dear Faber Fortunae of my Lord Bacon,” or “ Thinking to hear Mistress Knight sing at her lodgings,” or musing on Dr. Bates’s sermon that day when the Presbyters bade farewell to London, and the cautious Samuel, having renewed his vows and being well content with finding himself a changed man, did take great pleasure in “the pretty, sprightly lady,” at St. Dunstan’s door. Perhaps Mr. Lamb’s gentle namesake sometimes paused on his way to the Inner Temple absent-mindedly to taste a pungent seed or two.

The recent Contributor who so pleasantly inveighs against a horticultural snobbishness may well prize our “reliable though commonplace” garden acquaintances. Those peasant marigolds are children of the Sun, and not the Lady Rose herself is a better comforter of the heart and spirit. “What a pother have authors made of roses!” cries Master Culpepper. “What a racket have they kept!” ’T is true that damask roses refresh, if one “ smell the sweet vapours thereof out of a perfuming-pot,” and “red roses do strengthen the heart,” — yes, verily, even when gathered from a florist’s box. But on the whole these votaries of Venus are much over-rated flowers, not to be named with Beatrice’s Benedictus, or honest wormwood, most martial of herbs.

Are you too dainty for thistles ? Here’s “ Love-in-Idleness, Three Faces-in-ahood, in Sussex, we call them Pancies.” Here’s rosemary, “it helpeth a weak memory” — pray you, love, remember. Here is fennel for you and columbines, and “ fennel is of good use for them that would see clearly.” Here is rue for you. excellent herb-of-grace, which “ secureth a man from poison.” And here is balm, of which “ Sciapus saith that it causeth the heart to be merry and driveth away all troublesome cares and thoughts out of the mind.” But since “Physick without astrology is like a lamp without oil,” see to it that every herb that drinks the dew be gathered in the hour of its star. How easily then had sad Ophelia escaped her murderous willow!

Wherefore, if skies are gray, and the verses come limping home again, — courage, my heart! Wet weather is good for the wild thyme, and thyme, fit herb of poets, “ both comforteth the phrensy and quickeneth the wit.” Even now celandine and pimpernel, foxglove, fellwort, and Jack-by-the-hedgeside are trooping all together in Kentish lanes; and though the heart-strengthening red roses have long since scattered their petals about New England doorsteps, southernwood survives them, and sweet Basil and dittany still linger in many a gentlewoman’s garden. For there is not a noisome humor of the mind but some “gallant fine temperate herb” may succor it; the very cracks in city pavements nourish convenient simples; and — is that a bud on the bit of geranium in my neighbor’s window across the way?