supposed to be a hybrid of canina and gallica. It was the White Rose of York, a red gallica being the badge of Lancaster. It has been found wild as a natural hybrid. William Paul in his 'Rose Garden' accounts for fifteen varieties. It is the White Rose of English cottage gardens, where it may still, in some districts, be found in some abundance. It must always be one of the most charming and individual of garden Roses. Though some of the older varieties may be lost, we still have the white, nearly single and full double, the double pink Maiden's Blush, and the very beautiful pale pink Celestial. All the alba varieties may be known by the distinct character of the foliage; the whole leaf has a wide, flat shape with the blunt leaflets handsomely toothed, and a quite peculiar bluish colour. The tenth section (Caninae) has the Dog Roses. At least a hundred species have been defined, but it has been found convenient to group them under certain typical forms. They range through Europe, North Africa and North-western Asia, but are absent in the Himalaya and Japan. The species of most use in gardens are R. rubrifolia, a plant with smooth, glaucous, red-tinted leaves, formerly regarded only as a curiosity, but now found useful for certain colour effects in gardening; and R. macrantha, a beautiful Rose found wild in France early in the 19th century. It has pale pink flowers three inches wide and is a valuable plant for half-wild places. The eleventh group (Villosae) contains a few species that are mainly of botanical interest, but two are of some value in gardens from their handsome fruit, namely R. Hawrana, a Hungarian plant with large red hips densely bristled, and a nearly related species R. pomifera, the Apple Rose, with still larger fruits that endure far into the winter. The twelfth and last section is Rubiginosae, the Sweetbriars. R. Eglanteria, the well-known Sweetbriar of gardens, is wild throughout Europe and extends to Persia. It is said to be one of the eight Roses known to classical authors and is the only British species that from old times has been welcomed in gardens. It is extremely long-lived. An old Sweetbriar cut down in Touraine near the middle of the last century showed in the stem section a hundred and twenty annual rings. In old English still-rooms, where the women of the better families made many good things, the young shoots were candied. It remained for an amateur, the late Lord Penzance, to recognise the possibilities of the Sweetbriar in hybridisation. After an arduous life of legal toil he devoted the years of his retirement to the raising of hybrid Roses; specialising in Sweetbriar. The kinds he produced, all more vigorous than the type, are a lasting benefit to gardens. In the work of professional Rosegrowers the last decade has seen astonishing progress; those of France, England, Germany and America taking part in an international contest of skill and judgment that is yearly enriching the already bewildering store of good things that awaits the choice of those who desire the best and most beautiful in their gardens. A careful study of 'The Genus Rosa' reveals not only its value to science in its development of clear issues from a mass of indefinite and sometimes conflicting evidence, and in the showing of Rose species, hitherto unfigured and barely known but now perfectly portrayed and exactly described, but proves its further and perhaps wider significance to ordinary students of Rose nature and Rose capability. The combination of delineation and scientific description, with the addition of the wealth of matter of supreme interest other than purely botanical, will serve as a further incentive to wellconsidered hybridisation as well as to a clearer understanding of the relationships of the wild Roses and of the garden kinds that have been derived from them. The book in its published form consists of a number of paper-covered parts in two portfolios, convenient for access and study. Its perfect production, both of page and picture, will be a joy to the bibliophile. GERTRUDE JEKYLL. Vol. 221.-No. 441. 2 c Art. 5.-THE SOUL OF QUEEN MARGUERITE. 1. Marguerites de la Marguerite. First Edition. Lyon, 1547. 2. The Mirror of the Sinful Soul. Translated by the Princess Elizabeth of England. Original MS. in the Bodleian Library MSS Cherry, 36.' Printed Edition Paris, 1558. in the Malone Collection, 52. 3. L'Heptameron. First Edition. 4. Le Tombeau de Marguerite de Sœurs Princesses en Angleterre. 5. Histoire de Foix, Béarn, et Navarre. Par Pierre Olhagarray, historiographe du Roy. Paris: Douceur, 1609. 6. Les Eloges et Vies des Reynes, Princesses, etc. Par Hilarion de Coste. Two vols. Paris: Cramoisy, 1650. 7. Les Lettres de Marguerite d'Anjou. Publiées d'après les manuscrits de la Bibliothèque du Roi par F. Génin. Paris Renouard, 1841. 8. Les dernières Poésies de Marguerite de Navarre. Publiées pour le premier fois par Abel Lefranc. Paris: Colin, 1896. 9. Marguerite d'Angoulême, et les Débuts de la Reforme. Par Marius Cabantous. Montauban: Granié, 1898. 10. Les Comptes de Louise de Savoie. Publiés pas Abel Lefranc. Paris: Champion, 1905. Two Sphinx-like riddles, of the deepest interest to students of human nature, are to be found in the career of Marguerite of Valois, Queen of Navarre: how was it that a woman who could write the Heptameron' could also write 'Le Miroir de l'Ame pécheresse'? and how was it that, with her attachment to the doctrines of the Reformation and her detestation of the abuses then prevalent in the Church of Rome, she did not openly profess a change of faith? To turn from the Heptameron' to the 'Mirror of the Sinful Soul' is like passing from a gay scene of romance, where the sunlit air echoes with love and laughter, to the tear-washed stones of a This translation was printed by John Bale in 1548, under the title A Godly Medytacyon of the Christen sowle concerning a love towards God and hys Christe,' and was reprinted by Henry Denham, in 1582, in a book compiled by Thomas Bentley, called 'The Monument of Matrones, conteining seuen severall Lamps of Virginitie.' penitent's cell, where the sounds of the outer world are drowned in solemn chant and prayer, and the cheering light of day is dimmed by the saintly images that obscure the pane. The two conceptions of life are both perfectly comprehensible; they mark the differing points of view in an age when Rabelais and Calvin were contemporaries and fellow-countrymen; and so far, they offer no problem for our consideration. But, when we find both these conceptions arising in one brain, when the Rabelais and the Calvin have their habitation in one human being, and that human being a woman too exquisitely tender for the austerities of the one, too purely spiritual for the exuberances of the other, a problem confronts us that may well excite our wonder, if not our incredulity. The problem has been fully recognised by Marguerite's biographers; and they have tried to solve it in various ways. Some say that the coarser tales of the 'Heptameron' were added by a later writer; some, that she wrote it in her youth and repented of it in her maturity. There are others who say that she merely wrote it to amuse her brother, Francis I, in his illness, and that the taste of the times, and not her own, is to be held accountable; others, again, that it was impossible for her to correct the vices of the age without depicting them, and that her purpose in so doing was an exclusively moral one. The two first of these solutions may be dismissed at once; that Marguerite was not the author of the coarser tales and that the book was written in her youth, are statements that have been refuted by recent students of her life and work-Madame Darmesteter, for example, and Prof. Saintsbury. The evidence that they bring forward is too long for quotation here, but it cannot fail to carry conviction to an unprejudiced reader. We are therefore left to decide between the other explanations offered to us—that the manners and customs of the age are responsible for the license of the 'Heptameron,' or that her purpose in embodying that license in her pages was an entirely moral one. ་ Robert Codrington, in the Introduction to his edition of the 'Heptameron' (printed in 1654), gives the reader a word of warning: If anything in the whole work shall appear too light, you must balance it with that which shall be found more solid, and impute it to the simplicity of those times, and to the condition of the Court, where Mars and Venus were for a long time the culminating planets.' But, though the manners and customs of the Renaissance must be judged from another standpoint than ours, though we must not forget that it was possible then for vice and devotion to go hand in hand in all sincerity, yet at the same time we must remember that some souls existed, who, while they could not be ranked as ascetics, were nevertheless distinguished by an unsullied purity. To compare Marguerite with her contemporary, St Teresa, would be unjust, seeing that the circumstances of their lives were altogether dissimilar; but to compare Marguerite with Vittoria Colonna is quite legitimate, seeing that both these beautiful and gifted women passed their days amid the attractions and temptations of Court life. Yet who could imagine the tales of the Heptameron' flowing from the pen of her whom Michael Angelo reverenced as an angel of God made visible on earth? As to the final attempt at explanation, the moral purpose that has been declared to purge the grossness of Marguerite's writings is well expressed in a quaint sonnet by F. Troyen, prefixed by Codrington to his translation, in which he says: · 'But in this Book, this peerless Queen to us, Doth, loathing Vice, in tears and smiles discuss, But in view of Marguerite's frank enjoyment of life and its pleasures, it is difficult to believe that she regarded the aventures piquantes that she described, merely as pegs upon which to hang sermons. They delighted her own sense of humour, or they could not have brought smiles to the faces of her readers. How then shall we discover the soul of Queen Marguerite-the real woman who lay hidden in the depths of that double-sided nature which made it possible for Rabelais to dedicate to her in certainty of her appreciation Des faits joyeux du bon Pantagruel,' while at the same time Melancthon claimed her support for the work of the Reformation on the ground that her piety recalled to him the words of Isaiah, 'Queens shall be thy nursing mothers! To reconcile the apparent inconsistency may perhaps be an impossible task, but the only chance of its |