legitimately to that bold Good Robin Hood who fed the poor.--Fresh from
this polite encounter, the squire vows money for his personal protection:
and he determines to speak his opinion of Sherwood's latest captain as
loudly as ever. That he will, I do not say. It might involve a large
sum per annum.

Similes are very well in their way. None can be sufficient in this case
without levelling a finger at the taxpayer--nay, directly mentioning him.
He is the key of our ingenuity. He pays his dues; he will not pay the
additional penny or two wanted of him, that we may be a step or two ahead
of the day we live in, unless he is frightened. But scarcely anything
less than the wild alarum of a tocsin will frighten him. Consequently
the tocsin has to be sounded; and the effect is woeful past measure: his
hugging of his army, his kneeling on the shore to his navy, his
implorations of his yeomanry and his hedges, are sad to note. His bursts
of pot-valiancy (the male side of the maiden Panic within his bosom) are
awful to his friends. Particular care must be taken after he has begun
to cool and calculate his chances of security, that he do not gather to
him a curtain of volunteers and go to sleep again behind them; for they
cost little in proportion to the much they pretend to be to him.
Patriotic taxpayers doubtless exist: prophetic ones, provident ones, do
not. At least we show that we are wanting in them. The taxpayer of a
free land taxes himself, and his disinclination for the bitter task, save
under circumstances of screaming urgency--as when the night-gear and bed-
linen of old convulsed Panic are like the churned Channel sea in the
track of two hundred hostile steamboats, let me say--is of the kind the
gentle schoolboy feels when death or an expedition has relieved him of
his tyrant, and he is entreated notwithstanding to go to his books.

Will you not own that the working of the system for scaring him and