Ellacombe's exhaustive work on the "Plant-Lore of Shakespeare," a book
to which we are much indebted in the following pages, as also to Mr.
Beisly's "Shakespeare's Garden."

_Aconite._[450] This plant, from the deadly virulence of its juice,
which, Mr. Turner says, "is of all poysones the most hastie poysone,"
is compared by Shakespeare to gunpowder, as in "2 Henry IV." (iv. 4):

"the united vessel of their blood,
Mingled with venom of suggestion,
As, force perforce, the age will pour it in,
Shall never leak, though it do work as strong
As aconitum, or rash gunpowder."

[450] _Aconitum napellus_, Wolf's-bane or Monk's-hood.

It is, too, probably alluded to in the following passage in "Romeo and
Juliet" (v. 1), where Romeo says:

"let me have
A dram of poison; such soon-speeding gear
As will disperse itself through all the veins,
That the life-weary taker may fall dead;
And that the trunk may be discharg'd of breath
As violently, as hasty powder fir'd
Doth hurry from the fatal cannon's womb."

According to Ovid, it derived its name from growing upon rock
(Metamorphoses, bk. vii. l. 418):

"Quae, quia nascuntur, dura vivacia caute,
Agrestes aconita vocant."

It is probably derived from the Greek [Greek: akonitos], "without a
struggle," in allusion to the intensity of its poisonous qualities.
Vergil[451] speaks of it, and tells us how the aconite deceives the
wretched gatherers, because often mistaken for some harmless plant.[452]
The ancients fabled it as the invention of Hecate,[453] who caused the
plant to spring from the foam of Cerberus, when Hercules dragged him
from the gloomy regions of Pluto. Ovid pictures the stepdame as
preparing a deadly potion of aconite (Metamorphoses, bk. i. l. 147):

"Lurida terribiles miscent aconita novercae."

[451] "Miseros fallunt aconita legentis" (Georgics, bk. ii. l. 152).

[452] See Ellacombe's "Plant-Lore of Shakespeare," 1878, pp. 7, 8.

[453] Dr. Prior's "Popular Names of British Plants," 1870, pp.
1, 2.

In hunting, the ancients poisoned their arrows with this venomous plant,
as "also when following their mortal brutal trade of slaughtering their
fellow-creatures."[454] Numerous instances are on record of fatal
results through persons eating this plant. In the "Philosophical
Transactions" (1732, vol. xxxvii.) we read of a man who was poisoned in