Famous Single Poems
These letters are six in number, including a postscript, and it is not Mr. Ball’s fault if they all read a good deal like the certificates of other days establishing the identity of the Old Original Doctor Jacob Townsend. Two only of the six are signed with the writers’ names, but these two have a special validity from the fact that the writer of one is a very old friend, who has more than once expressed his wish to be Mr. Ball’s literary executor, while the writer of the other is evidently a legal gent, for he begins with “Relative to the controversy in re the authorship,” etc., like a legal gent, and he concludes with the statement that he is able to fix the date when he heard Mr. Ball read “Rock Me to Sleep” by the date of a paper which he thinks he called to draw up at Mr. Ball’s residence some time in the autumn of 1859. This is Mr. J. Burrows Hyde.
Mr. Lewis C. Grover, who would like to be Mr. Ball’s literary executor, is more definite, and says that he heard Mr. Ball read the contested poem with others in 1857, during a call made to learn where Mr. Ball bought his damask curtains. H. D. E. is sorry that he or she cannot remember where he or she first heard Mr. Ball read it, but he or she distinctly remembers that it was in 1857 or 1858. L. P. and I. E. S. witness that they heard Mr. Ball read it in his study in 1856 or 1857, and state that the date may be fixed by reference to the time “when Mr. Ball took Maria to Dr. Cox’s, and placed her in the school in Leroy,” and the pamphleteer, turning to a bill rendered by the principal of the Leroy
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