True, Jack; but it was Browning who made the figure into a universally comprehensible referent. The fact that everyone knows what is meant by describing someone as 'a Pied Piper' is down to Browning alone; just as Macbeth & Hamlet wouldn't be any sort of symbolic figures if we only had Holinshed & Saxo Grammaticus as our authorities. Not, of course, that I was serious about the royalties; he has obviously been dead much too long to have any such claim. But my point emblematically remains.

~M~