It is said however in the Lay that the Pedlar's name was Stout. It may have been so; and yet I am disposed to think that this is a corrupt passage, and that stout in this place is more probably an epithet, than a name. The verse may probably have run thus, There came by a Pedlar, a losell stout, a stout thief being formerly as common a designation as a sturdy beggar. This rogue seeing her asleep by the way-side, cut her petticoats all round about up to the knee; whence it appears not only how soundly she must have been sleeping, and how expert he was in this branch of his trade, but also that her pockets were in her petticoats and not a separate article of her dress. At the marriage of Sir Philip Herbert with the Lady Susan Vere, which was performed at the Court of Whitehall, in the year 1604, with all the honour that could be done to a great favourite, many great Ladies were made shorter by the skirts, like the Little Woman; and Sir Dudley Carleton says “they were well enough served that they could keep cut no better.” If the reader asks what is keeping cut? he asks a question I cannot answer. I have already observed that the weather was warm, and the proof is twofold, first in the Little Woman's sitting down by the way, which in cold weather she would not have done; and secondly, because when she awoke and discovered the condition in which this cut-purse had left her, she began to quiver and quake, for these words are plainly intended to denote at the same time a sense of chilliness, and an emotion of fear. She quivered perhaps for cold having been deprived of so great a part of her lower garments; but she quaked for fear, considering as well the danger she had been in, as the injury which she had actually sustained. The confusion of mind produced by these mingled emotions was so remarkable that Mr. Coleridge might have thought it not unworthy of his psychological and transcendental investigations; and Mr. Wordsworth might make it the subject of a modern Lay to be classed either among his poems of the Fancy, or of the Imagination as might to him seem fit. For the Lay says that the Little Woman instead of doubting for a while whether she were asleep or awake, that is to say whether she were in a dream because of the strange, and indecorous, and uncomfortable and unaccountable condition in which she found herself, doubted her own identity, and asked herself whether she were herself, or not? So little was she able to answer so subtle a question satisfactorily that she determined upon referring it to the decision of a little dog which she had left at home, and whose fidelity and instinctive sagacity could not, she thought, be deceived. “If it be I,” said she, “as I hope it be, he will wag his little tail for joy at my return; if it be not I, he will bark at me for a stranger.” Homeward therefore the Little Woman went, and confused as she was, she found her way there instinctively like Dr.