at she was not wholly the benevolent power to endow, as accorded
with the prevailing deceived notion of the vulgar. But he wished not
to discuss more particularly than thus, as he had drawn up to himself a
certain frontier of reticence; and so fell to petting a great black
pig, of which he made an unseemly companion, and to talking idly._"

A Gyges ring they bear about them still,
To be, and not, seen when and where they will;

They tread on clouds, and though they sometimes fall,
They fall like dew, and make no noise at all:

So silently they one to th' other come
As colors steal into the pear or plum;

And air-like, leave no pression to be seen
Where'er they met, or parting place has been.

ROBERT HERRICK.--_My Lovers how They Come and Part_.

CONCERNING CORINNA

The matter hinges entirely upon whether or not Robert Herrick was
insane. Sir Thomas Browne always preferred to think that he was;
whereas Philip Borsdale perversely considered the answer to be
optional. Perversely, Sir Thomas protested, because he said that to
believe in Herrick's sanity was not conducive to your own.

This much is certain: the old clergyman, a man of few friends and no
intimates, enjoyed in Devon, thanks to his time-hallowed reputation for
singularity, a certain immunity. In and about Dean Prior, for
instance, it was conceded in 1674 that it was unusual for a divine of
the Church of England to make a black pig--and a pig of peculiarly
diabolical ugliness, at that--his ordinary associate; but Dean Prior
had come long ago to accept the grisly brute as a concomitant of Dr.
Herrick's presence almost as inevitable as his shadow. It was no crime
to be fond of dumb animals, not even of one so inordinately
unprepossessing; and you allowed for eccentricities, in any event, in
dealing with a poet.

For Totnes, Buckfastleigh, Dean Prior--all that part of Devon, in
fact--complacently basked in the reflected glory of Robert Herrick.
People came from a long distance, now that the Parliamentary Wars were
over, in order just to see the writer of the _Hesperides_ and the
_Noble Numbers_. And such enthusiasts found in Robert Herrick a
hideous dreamy man, who, without ever perpetrating any actual
discourtesy, always managed to dismiss them, somehow, with a sense of
having been rebuffed.

Sir Thomas Browne, that ardent amateur of the curious, came into Devon,
however, without the risk of incurring any such fate, in