" On one occasion I heard Lowell tell a story in which he surrendered himself fully to the rustic heredity that was in him, flinging aside the accretions of culture.

It has shown that the meager Vita is a conglomeration of a few chance facts set into a mass of later conjecture derived from a literal-minded interpretation of the Eclogues, to which there gathered during the credulous and neurotic decades of the second and third centuries an accretion of irresponsible gossip.

" Then he descended, fresh as a boy, although the promontory which prevented a direct vision of his toes showed accretions.