ment he enters a sick room, he will see
his father spiritually present there; and unless he finds him seated at
the sick's man's head, that man is not yet doomed. Thus endowed, Doctor
----can cure a patient who was despaired of, with a dose of penny-royal,
and justly predict death for one whose only ailment is a pimple. His
success carries all before it. One day, however, he is summoned to the
emperor, who lies sick; and the emperor offers gold, and power, and,
lastly, his daughter's hand, as the price of his recovery. But this time
Satan sits at the head of the bed, and not even such an appeal to his
pride and greed will induce him to grant the patient even a temporary
reprieve. The son, thus driven to bay, pretends to be struck by a sudden
thought. "He will try the efficacy of the mystic Jacob's staff." He
whispers to an attendant to bid his mother bring it; and as Satan's Bad
Wife enters the room, Satan vanishes through the ceiling, leaving a
smell of sulphur behind him. The Emperor gets well; but Doctor
----renounces the promised gold: for it was to be the Princess's dowry;
and he is too wise to accept it on the condition of saddling himself
with a wife.

"PAN AND LUNA" describes a mythical adventure of Luna--the moon, given
by Virgil in the Georgics; and has for its text a line from them (III.
390):

"Si credere dignum est."[108]

According to the legend, Luna was one night entrapped by Pan who lay in
wait for her in the form of a cloud, soft and snowy as the fleece of a
certain breed of sheep; and, Virgil continues, followed him to the
woodland, "by no means spurning him." But Mr. Browning tells the story
in a manner more consonant with the traditional modesty of the
"Girl-Moon." She was, he says, distressed by the exposure of her
full-orbed charms, as she flew bare through the vault of heaven: the
protecting darkness ever vanishing before her; and she took refuge for
concealment in the cloud of which the fleecy billows were to close and
contract about her, in the limbs of the goat-god. How little she
accepted this her first eclipse, may be shown, he thinks, by the fact
that she never now lingers within a cloud longer than is necessary to
"rip" it through.

"JOCOSERIA."

The volume so christened (grave and gay), published 1883, shows a
greater variety of subject and treatment than do the Dramatic Idyls, and
its contents might be still more easily broken up; but they are also
best given in their o