Chapter Rosa to Rose of R by Brewer's Readers Handbook

unto a knot, in a garden called a maze. But the queen came to her by a clue of thredde, and so dealt with her that she lived not long after. She was buried at Godstow, in a house of nunnes, with these verses upon her tombe—

Hic jacet in tumba Rosa mundi, non Rosa munda;
Non redolet, sed olet, quæ redolere solet.

Here Rose the graced, not Rose the chaste, reposes;
The smell that rises is no smell of roses.
   —E. C. B.

N.B.—The subject has been a great favourite with poets. We have—

In English: (1) The tragedies of—

Bancroft or Mountford, 1693 (Henry II…. with the Death of Rosamond).

Daniel, before 1619 (The Complaint of Rosamond).

Hawkins, 1749 (Henry and Rosamond).

Korner, 1812 (Rosamond the Fair).

Swinburne, 1861 (Rosamond).

Tennyson, 1879 (Fair Rosamond).

(2) The operas of—

Addison, 1706; Dr. Arne, 1733; and Barnett (Rosamond the Fair), 1836.

(3) A ballad by Thomas Deloney, 1612.

(4) A poem (The Complaint of Rosamond) by S. Daniel, 1594. He supposes that the frail fair one tells her pitiful story from the lower world.

In Italian: Rosmonda, 1526, by Rucellai.

In Spanish: Rosmunda (an opera), 1840, by Gil y Zarate.

In French: Rosamondo (a poem) by C. Briffaut, 1815.

(Sir Walter Scott has introduced the beautiful soiled dove in two of his novels, viz. The Talisman and Woodstock.)

Dryden says her name was Jane—

Jane Clifford was her name, as books aver;
“Fair Rosamond” was but her nom de guerre.

We rede that in Englande was a king that had a concubyne whose name was Rose, and for hir greate bewtye he cleped hir Rose à mounde (Rosa mundi), that is to say, Rose of the world, for him thought that she passed al wymen in bewtye.—R. Pynson (1493), subsequently printed by Wynken de Worde in 1496.

N.B.—The Rosemonde of Alfieri is quite another person. (See Rosemond.)

Rosamond Vincy, in Middlemarch, a novel by George Eliot (Mrs. J. W. Cross), who is eventually married to Lydgate, the young doctor (1872).