Random Glimpses of Society Author:John Poole General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1887 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: 'JACKS.' JHAT'S in a name?' Much, very much, in spite of our grandest English Poet's dictum ! In short, I venture to doubt, ' if a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,' at all events until the new name had weathered ages, and ousted the dear old one from the minds and memories of men, and, harder still, from the pages of many a book rendered immortal by the undying flame of genius. The very word brings such a flood of recollection over us! Talk of a rose, and eyes brighten as each sees his particular flower, in the mirror of imagination, growing, it may be, on a cottage porch or a hedge, or nestling among soft bright hair, certainly in some places where we loved to see it, and have never forgotten the sight. But to conversation about' The Duke of Edinburgh'' Baroness Rothschild," and such grand names, only the learned in roses and gardeners will care to listen. No chord of memory will be stirred, no vision of long ago come back to us. We may recollect a hot crowded flower show, or perhaps ordering such and such a rose at our florists, because it matched or contrasted well with a particular dress, but the stately name of a variety of the Queen of Flowers, brings no old associations in its train. No poet has sung of it; no eyes grown dim over the faint scent of its dead leaves. It is a rose, that is all we care to know as we reverently put away the brown leaves, once blushing and fresh as ' sweet seventeen ' herself, and gathered, perhaps, by some departed one who was very dear to us. I did not mean to write about roses, but about certain children who, bearing the name of ' Jack,' seem to awake...« less