nothing equivalent to "Go away, please," no flower for "Idiot!" The only
possible defence was something in this way: "Your cruelty causes me
sorrow," "Your absence is a pleasure." For this, according to the code
of Mr. Thomas Miller (third edition, 1841, with elegantly coloured
plates) you would have to get a sweet-pea blossom for Pleasure, wormwood
for Absence, and indicate Sorrow by the yew, and Cruelty by the
stinging-nettle. There is always a little risk of mixing your predicates
in this kind of communication, and he might, for instance, read that his
Absence caused you Sorrow, but he could scarcely miss the point of the
stinging-nettle. That and the gorse carefully concealed were about the
only gleams of humour possible in the language. But then it was the
appointed tongue of lovers, and while their sickness is upon them they
have neither humour nor wit.

This Mr. Thomas Miller wrote abundant flowers of language in his book,
and the plates were coloured by hand. By the bye, what a blessed thing
colour-printing is! These hand-tinted plates, to an imaginative person,
are about as distressing as any plates can very well be. Whenever I look
at these triumphs of art over the beauties of nature, with all their
weary dabs of crimson, green, blue, and yellow, I think of wretched,
anæmic girls fading their youth away in some dismal attic over a
publisher's, toiling through the whole edition tint by tint, and being
mocked the while by Mr. Miller's alliterative erotics. And they _are_
erotics! In one place he writes, "Beautiful art thou, O Broom! on the
breezy bosom of the bee-haunted heath"; and throughout he buds and
blossoms into similar delights. He wallows in doves and coy toyings and
modest blushes, and bowers and meads. He always adds, "Wonderful boy!"
to Chatterton's name as if it were a university degree (W.B.), and he
invariably refers to Moore as the Bard of Erin, and to Milton as the
Bard of Paradise--though Bard of the Bottomless Pit would be more