... robin-red-breast piously
Did cover them with leaves,
has a parallel in Horace, who tells us that when he was a child, fallen asleep in a desert wood, the turtle doves took pity on him and covered him with leaves.
The popular belief that the robin covers dead bodies with leaves (probably founded on the habits of the bird) is of considerable antiquity. The passage in Cymbeline (act iv. sc. 2) naturally occurs as the chief illustration:—
... "the ruddock would,
With charitable bill....
... bring thee all this,
Yea and furr'd moss besides, when flowers are none,
To winter-ground thy corse."
In Webster's White Devil, act v., we read:—
"Call for the robin red breast and the wren
Since o'er shady groves they hover
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men."
The critics suppose Webster to have imitated Shakespere here, but there is no ground for any such supposition. The industry of Reed, Steevens, and Douce has supplied us with several passages from old literature in which this characteristic of the robin is referred to.
In "Cornucopiæ, or, divers Secrets; wherein is contained the rare secrets of man, beasts, fowles, fishes, trees, plants, stones, and such like, most pleasant and profitable, and not before committed to bee printed in English. Newlie drawen out of divers Latine Authors into English by Thomas Johnson," 4to. London, 1596, occurs the following passage:—"The robin red-breast if he find a man or woman dead will cover all his face with mosse, and some thinke that if the body should remaine unburied that hee woulde cover the whole body also."
This little secret of Johnson is copied by Thomas Lupton into his A Thousand Notable Things of sundrie sorts newly corrected, 1601, where it appears as No. 37 of book i.
Michael Drayton has the following lines in his poem, The Owl: