a kind of ancient poem amongst the French, consisting of very short verses.

There were two sorts of lays, the great and the little. The first was a poem consisting of twelve couplets of verses, of different measures. The second was a poem consisting of sixteen or twenty verses, divided into four couplets. These lays were the lyric poetry of the old French poets, and were imitated by some of the English. They were principally used on melancholy subjects, and are said to have been formed on the model of the trochaic verses of the Greek and Latin tragedies.