[524] Dian's bud is the bud of the _Agnus castus_, or chaste tree. "The virtue this herbe is, that he will kepe man and woman chaste." "Macer's Herbal," 1527.
[525] Cupid's flower, another name for the pansy.
"It has been suggested," says Mr. Aldis Wright,[526] "that the device employed by Oberon to enchant Titania by anointing her eyelids with the juice of a flower, may have been borrowed by Shakespeare from the Spanish romance of 'Diana' by George of Montemayor. But apart from the difficulty which arises from the fact that no English translation of this romance is known before that published by Young in 1598, there is no necessity to suppose that Shakespeare was indebted to any one for what must have been a familiar element in all incantations at a time when a belief in witchcraft was common." Percy ("Reliques," vol. iii. bk. 2) quotes a receipt by the celebrated astrologer, Dr. Dee, for "an ungent to anoynt under the eyelids, and upon the eyelids eveninge and morninge, but especially when you call," that is, upon the fairies. It consisted of a decoction of various flowers.
[526] Notes to "A Midsummer-Night's Dream," 1877. Preface, p. xx.
_Mandragora_ or _Mandrake_. No plant, perhaps, has had, at different times, a greater share of folk-lore attributed to it than the mandrake; partly owing, probably, to the fancied resemblance of its root to the human figure, and the accidental circumstance of _man_ being the first syllable of the word. An inferior degree of animal life was assigned to it; and it was commonly supposed that, when torn from the ground, it uttered groans of so pernicious a character, that the person who committed the violence either went mad or died. In "2 Henry VI." (iii. 2) Suffolk says:
"Would curses kill, as doth the mandrake's groan, I would invent," etc.
And Juliet ("Romeo and Juliet," iv. 3) speaks of
"shrieks like mandrakes' torn out of the earth, That living mortals, hearing them, run mad."
To escape this danger, it was recommended to tie one end of a string to the plant and the other to a dog, upon whom the fatal groan would discharge its whole malignity. The ancients, it appears, were equally superstitious with regard to this mysterious plant, and Columella, in his directions for the site of gardens, says they may be formed where