Quite one of the most lovely things that Heaven has made, and only degraded
and distorted by any human interference; the swollen varieties of it
produced by cultivation being all gross in outline and coarse in colour by
comparison.

It is badly drawn even in the 'Flora Danica,' No. 623, considered there
apparently as a species escaped from gardens; the description of it being
as follows:--

"Viola tricolor hortensis repens, flore purpureo et coeruleo, C.B.P., 199."
(I don't know what C.B.P. means.) "Passim, juxta villas."

"Viola tricolor, caule triquetro diffuso, foliis oblongis incisis, stipulis
pinnatifidis," Linn. Systema Naturæ, 185.

33. "Near the country farms"--does the Danish botanist mean?--the more
luxuriant weedy character probably acquired by it only in such
neighbourhood; and, I suppose, various confusion and degeneration possible
to it beyond other plants when once it leaves its wild home. It is given by
Sibthorpe from the Trojan Olympus, with an exquisitely delicate leaf; the
flower described as "triste et pallide violaceus," but coloured in his
plate full purple; and as he does not say whether he went up Olympus to
gather it himself, or only saw it brought down by the assistant whose
lovely drawings are yet at Oxford, I take leave to doubt his epithets. That
this should be the only Violet described in a 'Flora Græca' extending to
ten folio volumes, is a fact in modern scientific history which I must
leave the Professor of Botany and the Dean of Christ Church to explain.

34. The English varieties seem often to be yellow in the lower petals, (see