[205] Thousands flocked to see this "miracle" in the middle ages, and their presence brought great wealth to the abbey. It was believed to have grown miraculously from the staff used by St. Joseph. It appears to have been brought from Palestine, and merely to have flowered in accordance with its natural season, though differing with ours. [206] Taylor, the water poet, in his "Wonders of the West," 1649, says that a slip was preserved by a vintner dwelling at Glastonbury, when the soldiers cut down the tree; that he set it in his garden, "and he with others did tell me that the same doth likewise bloom on the 25th day of December, yearly." [207] Many of these tales of treasures in hills, are now reduced to the simple facts of discoveries being made of coins and personal ornaments, in tumuli of Roman and Saxon settlers in England. In the British Museum is a gold breastplate found in a grave at Mold, in Flintshire. The grave-hills of Bohemia have furnished the museum at Vienna with a large number of gold objects of great size and value. In Russia the dead have been found placed between large plates of pure gold in the centre of such tumuli; and in Ireland very large and valuable gold personal ornaments have been frequently found in grave-hills. ON PUCK THE COMMENTATOR. Literary forgeries recently have been frequently indulged in, and it is urged that they are of an innocent nature; but impostures more easily practised than detected leave their mischief behind, to take effect at a distant period; and as I shall show, may entrap even the judicious! It may require no high exertion of genius to draw up a grave account of an ancient play-wright whose name has never reached us, or to give an extract from a volume inaccessible to our inquiries and, as dulness is no proof of spuriousness, forgeries, in time, mix with authentic documents.[208] We have ourselves witnessed versions of Spanish and Portuguese poets, which are passed on their unsuspicious readers without difficulty, but in which no parts of the pretended originals can be traced; and to the present hour, whatever antiquaries may affirm, the poems of Chatterton[209] and Ossian[210] are veiled in mystery!