185. _An Ode to Master Endymion Porter, upon his brother's death._ Endymion Porter is said to have had an only brother, Giles, who died in the king's service at Oxford, _i.e._, between 1642 and 1646, and it has been taken for granted that this ode refers to his death. The supposition is possibly right, but if so, the ode, despite its beauty, is so gratingly and extraordinarily selfish that we may wonder if the dead brother is not the William Herrick of the next poem. The first verse is, of course, a soliloquy of Herrick's, not, as Dr. Grosart suggests, addressed to him by Porter. Dr. Nott again parallels Catullus, _Carm_. v. 186. _To his dying brother, Master William Herrick._ According to Dr. Grosart and Mr. Hazlitt the poet had an elder brother, William, baptized at St. Vedast's, Foster Lane, Nov. 24, 1585 (he must have been born some months earlier, if this date be right, for his sister Martha was baptized in the following January), and alive in 1629, when he acted as one of the executors of his mother's will. But, it is said, there was also another brother named William, born in 1593, after his father's death, "at Harry Campion's house at Hampton". I have not been able to find the authority for this last statement, which, as it asserts the co-existence of two brothers, of the same name, is certainly surprising. According to Dr. Grosart, it is the younger William who "died young" and was addressed in this poem, but I must own to feeling some doubt in the matter. 193. _The Lily in a Crystal._ The poem may be taken as an expansion of Martial, VIII. lxviii. 5-8:-- Condita perspicuâ vivit vindemia gemmâ Et tegitur felix, nec tamen uva latet: Femineum lucet sic per bombycina corpus, Calculus in nitidâ sic numeratur aquâ. 197. _The Welcome to Sack._ Two MSS. at the British Museum (Harl. 6931 and Add. 19,268) contain copies of this important poem. These copies differ considerably from the printed version, are proved by small variations to be independent of each other, and at the same time agree in all important points. We may conclude, therefore, that they represent an earlier version of the poem, subsequently revised by Herrick before the issue of _Hesperides_. In the subjoined copy, in which the two MSS. are corrected from each other, italics show the variations, asterisks mark lines omitted in _Hesperides_, and a dagger the absence of lines subsequently added.