Note 12 — BLUMENEGG

The former of these speaks of Milton’s “habitually loose botany.” No great blemish; given the themes he loved, it might be argued that much of Milton’s peculiar aroma would evaporate, had he been meticulous in such details like Tennyson or de Tabley. Theocritus is hard to catch napping; but Ovid, for example, tells us that buxus grows on Mount Hymettus. There is no box on Hymettus, though it prospers in certain gardens of Athens (e. g., the Crown Prince’s); Ovid was thinking of the dwarf holly. It is the worst of writing poetry, that you are apt to be torn between respect for truth and the exigencies of scansion. What would the painfully correct Lucretius have done with this buxus?