There was a female personage of whom I will venture to say that every one of my English readers, (Quakers perhaps excepted) has heard tell; and a great many of my Scotch, Welsh, Irish, and Transatlantic ones also—I venture to say this because her remarkable story has been transmitted to us in a Lay, a species of composition the full value of which has never been understood till the present age. Niebuhr and his learned followers assure us that the whole early history of Rome is founded upon no other authority than that of Lays, which have long since perished. And very possibly there may be German professors of Divinity who in like manner trace the Jewish history before Samuel to the Lays of Samson, Jephthah, Gideon, and other heroes of the Kritarchy, of Joshua, and of Moses, and so of the Patriarchs upwards. To be sure it might startle us somewhat if these Lays were called by the old fashioned name of Ballads, or old songs; and had either of those appellations been used we might hesitate a little before we gave implicit credit to so great a discovery. Returning however to the personage of the Lay to which I have alluded, and which has been handed down from mother and nurse to child by immemorial tradition, and not stopping to enquire whether the tale itself is an historical matter of fact, or what is now called a mythos, and whether the personage is a mythological personage, the Lay of the Little Woman when reduced to history, or prose narration, says that she went to market to sell her eggs;—in historifying the fact from this metrical document, I must take care to avoid any such collocation of words as might lead me into the worst of all possible styles, that of poetical prose. Numerous prose indeed not only carries with it a charm to the ear but affords such facility to the utterance, that the difference between reading aloud from a book so composed, or from one which has been written without any feeling of numerousness on the writer's part, is as great and perceptible as the difference between travelling upon an old road, or a macadamized one. Twenty pages of the one will exhaust the reader more than threescore of the other, just as there was more fatigue in a journey of fifty miles, fifty years ago, than there is in thrice the distance now. The fact is certain, and may no doubt be physically explained. But numerous prose and poetical prose, are things as different as gracefulness and affectation.