172 
PLANT-LORE OF SHAKESPEARE 
by our heathen ancestors, so that, though admitted into houses, 
it was not (or very seldom) admitted into churches. And this 
character so far still attaches to the Mistletoe, that it is never 
allowed with the Holly and Ivy and Box to decorate the 
churches, and Gay’s lines were certainly written in error— 
“ Now with bright Holly all the temples strow, 
With Laurel green and sacred Mistletoe.” 
The mystery attaching to the Mistletoe arose from the 
ignorance as to its production. It was supposed not to grow 
from its seeds, and how it was produced was a fit subject for 
speculation and fable. Virgil tells the story thus— 
“ Quale solet sylvis brumali frigore viscum 
Fronde virere nova, quod non sua seminat arbos, 
Et croceo foetu teretes circumdare truncos.”— BEneid ., vi. 205. 
In this way Virgil elegantly veils his ignorance, but his 
commentator in the eighteenth century (Delphic Classics) tells 
the tale without any doubts as to its truth. “Non nascitur e 
semine proprio arboris, at neque ex insidentum volucrum fimo, 
ut putavere veteres, sed ex ipso arborum vitali excremento.” 
This was the opinion of Bacon; he ridiculed the idea that the 
Mistletoe was propagated by the operation of a bird as an idle 
tradition, saying that the sap which produces the plant is such 
as “ the tree doth excerne and cannot assimilate,” and Browne 
(“Vulgar Errors”) was of the same opinion. But the opposite 
opinion was perpetuated in the very name (“ Mistel; fimus, 
muck,” Cockayne), 1 and was held without any doubt by most 
of the writers in Shakespeare’s time—• 
“ Upon the oak, the plumb-tree and the holme, 
The stock-dove and the blackbird should not come, 
Whose mooting on the trees does make to grow 
Rots-curing hyphear, and the Mistletoe.” 
Browne, Brit. Bast., i. 1. 
1 11 Mistel est a mist stercus, quod ex stercore avium pronascitur, nec 
aliter pronasci potest.”— Wachter, Glossary (quoted in “Notes and 
Queries,” 3rd series, vii. 157. In the same volume are several papers on 
the origin of the word). Dr. Prior derives it from mistl (different), and 
tan (twig), being so unlike the tree it grows upon. 
