not suffer on a comparison with Tennyson's "Enid" and Chaucer's story of
patient Griselda ("The Clerkes Tale") with which they have a common
theme. It is the medieval world. Marauders, pilgrims, and wandering
gleemen go about in it. The knight stands at his garden pale, the lady
sits at her bower window, and the little foot page carries messages over
moss and moor. Marchmen are riding through the Bateable Land "by the hie
light o' the moon." Monks are chanting in St. Mary's Kirk, trumpets are
blowing in Carlisle town, castles are burning; down in the glen there is
an ambush and swords are flashing; bows are twanging in the greenwood;
four and twenty ladies are playing at the ball, and four and twenty
milk-white calves are in the woods of Glentanner--all ready to be stolen.
About Yule the round tables begin; the queen looks over the castle-wall,
the palmer returns from the Holy Land, Young Waters lies deep in Stirling
dungeon, but Child Maurice is in the silver wood, combing his yellow
locks with a silver comb.

There is an almost epic coherence about the ballads of the Robin Hood
cycle. This good robber, who with his merry men haunted the forests of
Sherwood and Barnsdale, was the real ballad hero and the darling of the
popular fancy which created him. For though the names of his confessor,
Friar Tuck; his mistress, Maid Marian; and his companions, Little John,
Scathelock, and Much the miller's son, have an air of reality,--and
though the tradition has associated itself with definite
localities,--there is nothing historical about Robin Hood. Langland, in
the fourteenth century, mentions "rhymes of Robin Hood"; and efforts have
been made to identify him with one of the dispossessed followers of Simon
de Montfort, in "the Barons' War," or with some still earlier
free-booter, of Hereward's time, who had taken to the woods and lived by
plundering the Normans. Myth as he is, he is a thoroughly national
conception. He had the English love of fair play; the English readiness