“Stem shrubby, with long flexile branches.” (Length or height not told.  I imagine like an ordinary heath’s.)

The term ‘carina,’ occurring twice in the above description, is peculiar to the structure of the pease and milk-worts; we will examine it afterwards.  The European varieties of the milkwort, except the chamaebuxus, are all minute,—­and, their ordinary epithets being at least inoffensive, I give them for reference till we find prettier ones; altering only the Calcarea, because we could not have a ‘Chalk Juliet,’ and two varieties of the Regina, changed for reason good—­her name, according to the last modern refinements of grace and ease in pronunciation, being Eu-vularis, var. genuina!  My readers may more happily remember her and her sister as follows:—­

16. (I.) Giulietta Regina.  Pure blue.  The same in colour, form, and size, throughout Europe.

(II.) Giulietta Soror-Reginae.  Pale, reddish-blue or white in the flower, and smaller in the leaf, otherwise like the Regina.

(III.) Giulietta Depressa.  The smallest of those I can find drawings of.  Flowers, blue; lilac in the fringe, and no bigger than pins’ heads; the leaves quite gem-like in minuteness and order.

(IV.) Giulietta Cisterciana.  Its present name, ‘Calcarea,’ is meant, in botanic Latin, to express its growth on limestone or chalk mountains.  But we might as well call the South Down sheep, Calcareous mutton.  My epithet will rightly associate it with the Burgundian hills round Cluny and Citeaux.  Its ground leaves are much larger than those of the Depressa; the flower a little larger, but very pale.

(V.) Giulietta Austriaca.  Pink, and very lovely, with bold cluster of ground leaves, but itself minute—­almost dwarf.  Called ’small bitter milkwort’ by S. How far distinct from the next following one, Norwegian, is not told.

The above five kinds are given by Sowerby as British, but I have never found the Austriaca myself.

(VI.) Giulietta Amara.  Norwegian.  Very quaint in blossom outline, like a little blue rabbit with long ears.  D. 1169.

17.  Nobody tells me why either this last or No. 5 have been called bitter; and Gerarde’s five kinds are distinguished only by colour—­blue, red, white, purple, and “the dark, of an overworn ill-favoured colour, which maketh it to differ from all others of his kind.”  I find no account of this ill-favoured one elsewhere.  The white is my Soror Reginae; the red must be the Austriaca; but the purple and overworn ones are perhaps now overworn indeed.  All of them must have been more common in Gerarde’s time than now, for he goes on to say “Milk-woort is called Ambarualis flos. so called because it doth specially flourish in the Crosse or Gang-weeke, or Rogation-weeke, of which flowers, the maidens which use in the countries to walk the procession do make themselves garlands and nosegaies, in English we may call it Crosse flower, Gang flower, Rogation flower, and Milk-woort.”