ince it would
in no wise fit into any place, he cast it out and set it as a bridge
over Cedron. Later on he buried it, and from the place where it lay
there sprang the healing spring of Bethesda, to the surface of which
it miraculously floated up, and the Jews found it and made of it the
Cross of Calvary.

These plays were probably written in the fifteenth century, perhaps by
one of the priests of Glazeney College near Falmouth, and were acted
with others that are now lost in the places called _Planan-Guare_ (the
Plain of the Play), of which several still remain. The 'Ordinalia'
were published with a translation by Edwin Norris in 1859.

3. _The Creation of the World, with Noah's Flood_, was a modernized
version of the first act of the first of the 'Ordinalia' trilogy. It
was written by William Jordan of Helston in 1611; but the author has
borrowed whole passages of considerable length from the older play.
The language represents a later period of Cornish, and occasionally
several lines of English are introduced. Perhaps by a natural Celtic
antipathy to the Saxon, these are generally put into the mouths of
Lucifer and his angels, who furnish a good deal of the comic part of
the piece. This play was published by Davies Gilbert in 1827, and by
Dr. Whitley Stokes in 1864.

4. _The Life of St. Meriasek._ This play, written in 1504, is perhaps
the most interesting of the batch. The story at least of the others
contains nothing very new to most people, but St. Meriasek or Meriadoc
(to give him his Breton name), the patron of Camborne, is not a
well-known character, and his life, full as it is of allusions and
incidents of a misty period of Cornish history, is most curious and
interesting. It is not perhaps simplified by being mixed up in the
wildest manner with the legend of Constantine and St. Sylvester, and
the scenes shift about from Cornwall or Brittany to Rome, and from the
fourth to the Heaven-knows-what century, with bewildering frequency.
There are also certain other legends interwoven with the story, and it
seems probable that at least three plays have been, as Dr. Whitley
Stokes expresses it, "unskillfully pieced together." Yet there are
many passages of considerable literary merit. The only existing MS. of
this play is in the Hengwrt collection at Peniarth, and it was edited
and translated by Dr. Stokes in 1872.

5. There were probably many other plays which have perished, but one
other there certainly was, of