The reference to _The Children in the Wood_ by no means satisfies my judgement. We all willingly throw ourselves back for awhile into the feelings of our childhood. This ballad, therefore, we read under such recollections of our own childish feelings, as would equally endear to us poems, which Mr. Wordsworth himself would regard as faulty in the opposite extreme of gaudy and technical ornament. Before the invention of printing, and in a still greater degree, before the introduction of writing, metre, especially alliterative metre (whether alliterative at the beginning of the words, as in _Piers Plowman_, or at the end, as in rhymes), possessed an independent value as assisting the recollection, and consequently the preservation, of _any_ series of truths or incidents. But I am not convinced by the collation of facts, that _The Children in the Wood_ owes either its preservation, or its popularity, to its metrical form. Mr. Marshal’s repository affords a number of tales in prose inferior in pathos and general merit, some of as old a date, and many as widely popular. _Tom Hickathrift_, _Jack the Giant-killer_, _Goody Two-shoes_, and _Little Red Riding-hood_ are formidable rivals. And that they have continued in prose, cannot be fairly explained by the assumption, that the comparative meanness of their thoughts and images precluded even the humblest forms of metre. The scene of _Goody Two-shoes_ in the church is perfectly susceptible of metrical narration; and, among the Θαὑματα θαυμαστὁτατα even of the present age, I do not recollect a more astonishing image than that of the ‘_whole rookery, that flew out of the giant’s beard_’, scared by the tremendous voice, with which this monster answered the challenge of the heroic _Tom Hickathrift_! If from these we turn to compositions universally, and independently of all early associations, beloved and admired, would _The Maria_, _The Monk_, or _The Poor Man’s Ass_ of Sterne, be read with more delight, or have a better chance of immortality, had they without any change in the diction been composed in rhyme, than in their present state? If I am not grossly mistaken, the general reply would be in the negative. Nay, I will confess, that, in Mr. Wordsworth’s own volumes, the _Anecdote for Fathers_, _Simon Lee_, _Alice Fell_, _The Beggars_, and _The Sailor’s Mother_, notwithstanding the beauties which are to be found in each of them where the poet interposes the music of his own thoughts, would have been more delightful to me in prose, told and managed, as by Mr. Wordsworth they would have been, in a moral essay, or pedestrian tour.