Note 197 — XXVIII.
Reading edition
According to Toland (Works, i. 74), the festival of searching, cutting, and consecrating the mistletoe, took place on the 10th of March, or New Year's day. "This," he says, "is the ceremony to which Virgil alludes, by his golden branch, in the Sixth Book of the Æneid." No doubt of it; for all these sacred plants had a common origin in some ancient and general symbolic idea.