ll" (i. 1), where
Parolles says: "Your date is better in your pie and your porridge, than
in your cheek." And in "Troilus and Cressida" (i. 2): "Ay, a minced man;
and then to be baked with no date in the pie; for then the man's date's
out."

_Ebony._ The wood of this tree was regarded as the typical emblem of
darkness; the tree itself, however, was unknown in this country in
Shakespeare's time. It is mentioned in "Love's Labour's Lost" (iv. 3):

"_King._ By heaven, thy love is black as ebony.

_Biron._ Is ebony like her? O wood divine!
A wife of such wood were felicity."

In the same play we read of "the ebon-coloured ink" (i. 1), and in
"Venus and Adonis" (948) of "Death's ebon dart."

_Elder._ This plant, while surrounded by an extensive folk-lore, has
from time immemorial possessed an evil reputation, and been regarded as
one of bad omen. According to a popular tradition "Judas was hanged on
an elder," a superstition mentioned by Biron in "Love's Labour's Lost"
(v. 2); and also by Ben Jonson in "Every Man Out of His Humour" (iv. 4):
"He shall be your Judas, and you shall be his elder-tree to hang on." In
"Piers Plowman's Vision" (ll. 593-596) we are told how

"Judas, he japed
With jewen silver,
And sithen on an eller
Hanged hymselve."

So firmly rooted was this belief in days gone by that Sir John
Mandeville tells us in his Travels, which he wrote in 1364, that he was
actually shown the identical tree at Jerusalem, "And faste by is zit,
the tree of Elder that Judas henge himself upon, for despeyr that he
hadde when he solde and betrayed oure Lord." This tradition no doubt, in
a great measure, helped to give it its bad fame, causing it to be spoken
of as "the stinking elder." Shakespeare makes it an emblem of grief. In
"Cymbeline" (iv. 2) Arviragus says:

"Grow, patience!
And let the stinking elder, grief, untwine
His perishing root with the increasing vine!"

The dwarf elder[491] (_Sambucus ebulus_) is said only to grow where
blood has been shed either in battle or in murder. The Welsh call it
"Llysan gward gwyr," or "plant of the blood of man." Shakespeare,
perhaps, had this piece of folk-lore in mind when he represents
Bassianus, in "Titus Andronicus" (ii. 4), as killed at a pit beneath an
elder-tree:

"This is the pit and this the elder tree."

[491] "Flower-Lore," p. 35.

_Eringoes._ These were formerly said to be strong