Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: OF BOLD ROBIN HOOD Whether the Robin Hood traditions are wholly fact or chiefly fiction is a matter of little moment. Maybe King Arthur, his Round Table, his knights and their high achievements, are dreams out of the ivory gate and visions before midnight. Maybe Robin Hood, his merry men, his trysting tree, and all the stout battles and saucy depredations of Barnesdale and the green Sherwood are but tales told in a chimney corner, rhymes born of the vagrant fancy of some metre ballad-monger of old time. We are told that William Tell did not shoot the apple from his son's head, that Blondel never sang under Richard's dungeon window, that the Duke of Wellington never uttered the words, Up, Guards, and at them. Those can believe such historical pruderies who will. For my part, I decline to surrender every pretty fragment of picturesque detail calculated to lend artistic verisimilitude to a bald and uninteresting narrative. My Blondel did sing, my William Tell did hit the apple, my Iron Duke used the exact words, Up, Guards, and at them. So with Robin Hood. A man, if only mean enough, may imagine him to have been a common ruffian, whose prowess with the longbow by no means equalled that of his chroniclers. For my part, I prefer to take him as I find him, and I find him, according to all the best traditions, a most picturesque figure, moving amid noble scenery, and doing deeds of gallantry and kindness. There were so few men in his day who spoke words of ruth to the poor, who were superior to base temptations, to malice and revenge, that it were a shame to blot this one bright soul out of the gloomy picture and leave nothing else but savagery, treachery, and vile lusts for us to look upon. So we will hold fast to Robin Hood, and his merry men, and his Maid Marion, ...