The reader does not require to have the story of Raleigh, questioning the cause of some disturbance under his window in the Tower, retold. Tradition is too indispensable to be cut away, yet too treacherous to believe without misgiving or without some convergence of proof. I have been turning over the pages of the _Hundred Merry Tales_ and the _Merry Tales and Quick Answers_ in quest of a few specimens of what might be adduced and regarded as original matter, and how thin is my harvest! Yet, onerous as are the obligations even of these ancient collections, the debt, it must be owned, is of a character and degree differing very essentially from that under which their successors lie to them again. For where there is loan or trespass, it is almost exclusively from obscure foreign sources unknown to the generality of readers, and betwixt we certainly get many an enjoyable bit of downright home-grown merriment or rascality. Among these I may be permitted to commend to attention the tales “Of the miller that stole the nuts of the tailor, that stole a sheep,” a piece of masterly structure, “Of the fat woman that sold fruit,” “Of the courtier that bad the boy hold his horse,” “Of him that healed frantic men,” which is cited both by Sir John Harington and Robert Burton, and “Of the two young men that rode to Walsingham.” These, and a dozen more scattered over the two books, have an insular air, although they may not be without their continental analogues. They look as if they had first seen the light on British ground, circumscribed by the waves which wash our cliffs; but anyhow they in their turn formed part of the general stock-in-trade, out of which a totally distinct class of men from More and Heywood here, and Erasmus abroad, carried on for ever and for ever the business of amusing a not very fastidious and not very critical constituency. The gratification at meeting once in a way with an anecdote in its pure and pristine state, is like the feeling when one secures an old picture with which the cleaner has not tampered, or a coin exempt from _tooling_ and corrosion.