person of independent property, and a member of the New
Jersey Legislature, who has written a great quantity of verses first and
last, but has become all but "proverbial" in his native State for his
carelessness of his own poetry; so that we suppose people say there of a
negligent parent, "His children are as unkempt as the Hon. Alexander M.
W. Ball's poems"; or of a heartless husband, "His wife is about as well
provided for as Mr. Ball's Muse." Still Mr. Ball is not altogether lost
to natural feeling, and he has not thrown away all his poetry, but has
even so far shown himself alive to its claims upon him as to read it now
and then to friends, who have keenly reproached him with his
indifference to fame. To such accidents we owe the preservation in this
pamphlet of several Christmas Carols and other lyrics, tending to prove
that Mr. Ball could have written "Rock me to Sleep" if he had wished,
and the much more important letters declaring that he did write it, and
that the subscribers of the letters heard him read it nearly three years
before its publication by Mrs. Akers. 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