Dogberry has a pondering look and a fribbling emphasis. He rolls the plump phrases over and over like a quid, but ejects them with a kind of strenuous drivel. He makes pauses, as if discriminating the juiciest reflection, but really settles at random, like a pigeon whose brain has been vivisected; so he concludes that, if a man will not stand when he is bid to, he may go; and that, though a thief ought to be arrested, they that touch pitch will be defiled; and that, on the whole, it is better to let him show himself what he is, and steal out of your company. Thus he attains to the merit of genius when it chips the egg and lets loose the struggling chick of the ordinary mind. He voices the perplexity of the watch, and lends to it the color of concession and sagacious compromise. It is exactly what old Verges thought but did not know how to incubate into definite expression. So all the people who sit upon political fences, and find the edge growing inconvenient, welcome the pad which postpones the necessity for a jump to either side. Dogberry admires and cossets his own authority, but is too timid to enforce it save with poor old Verges, whose mental feebleness is an exact shadow of Dogberry's; and the latter manages to step upon himself in amusing unconsciousness. "An old man, sir, and his wits are not so blunt, as, God help, I would desire they were." A good old man, sir; but he will gabble. All men are not alike, alas! So he goes on, dismissing himself, and slamming to the door without observing it. But when the watch blunders by reason of idiocy into arresting Borachio, who was the agent in the plot against Hero, the innocent Conrade is found in his company, listening to his disclosures. He, too, is carried off and confronted with Dogberry before the whole "dissembly" of constables. Then and there Conrade calls him in set terms an ass.