ROBIN HOOD RESCUING THE WIDOW'S THREE SONS. After Ritson, who has collected in two volumes the ballads of Robin Hood. This is believed to be one of the oldest of them all. A concise introduction to the Robin Hood ballads is given by Mr. Hales in the _Percy Folio MS_. vol. i. This legendary king of Sherwood Forest is more rightfully the hero of English song than his splendid rival, the Keltic King Arthur, "whose name, a ghost, Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain peak, And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still." Yet there is scarcely less doubt as to the actual existence of a flesh-and-blood Robin Hood than there is as to the actual existence of a flesh-and-blood King Arthur. But let History look to her own; Literature need have no scruple in claiming both the archer-prince of outlaws and the blameless king of the Table Round. Robber chieftain or democratic agitator, romantic invention or Odin-myth, it is certain that by the fourteenth century Robin Hood was a familiar figure in English balladry. We have our first reference to this generous-hearted rogue of the greenwood, who is supposed by Ritson to have lived from 1160 to 1247, in Langlande's _Piers Ploughman_ (1362). There are brief notices of the popular bandit in Wyntoun's _Scottish Chronicle_ (1420), Fordun's _Scotichronicon_ (1450), and Mair's _Historia Majoris Brittaniae_ (1521). Famous literary allusions occur in Latimer's _Sixth Sermon before Edward VI_. (1548), in Drayton's _Polyolbion_ (1613), and Fuller's _Worthies of England_ (1662). The Robin Hood ballads illustrate to the full the rough and heavy qualities, both of form and thought, that characterize all our English folk-songs as opposed to the Scottish. We feel the difference instantly when a minstrel from over the Border catches up the strain: "There's mony ane sings o'grass, o'grass, And mony ane sings o'corn; And mony ane sings o'Robin Hood, Kens little whar' he was born. "It was na' in the ha', the ha', Nor in the painted bower; But it was in the gude greenwood, Amang the lily flower." Yet these rude English ballads have just claims on our regard. They stand our feet squarely upon the basal rock of Saxon ethics, they breathe a spirit of the sturdiest independence, and they draw, in a few strong strokes, so fresh a picture of the joyous, fearless life led under the green shadows of the deer-haunted forest by that memorable band, bold Robin and Little John, Friar Tuck and George a Green, Will Scarlett, Midge the Miller's Son, Maid Marian and the rest, that we gladly succumb to a charm recognized by Shakespeare himself: "They say he is already in the forest of Arden, and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England; they say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world."--_As You Like It._