The last reason for exclusion particularly affects the Robin Hood ballads, among which Child prints thirty-three late broadsides and fragments which I omit. He preferred to err by inclusion rather than exclusion, and states that he has admitted more than one ballad, ‘actually worthless and manifestly spurious, because of a remote possibility that it might contain relics, or be a debased representative, of something genuine and better.’[3] I cannot take leave of nine years’ intermittent work on this selection without remembering that its ‘only begetter’ was Mr. A. H. Bullen, with whom I published the first three volumes. While I regret to think how different it is in the result from the edition he then envisaged, I gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to him for the inoculation. The anthologist is strictly a plucker of the flowers of literature; but the ballads are not literature--they are lore, and therefore of warmer human interest. F. S. [Footnote 1: _The Popular Ballad_ (1907), p. 228.] [Footnote 2: These are _The Nutbrown Maid_, First Series; The _Lyke-Wake Dirge_ and _Adam_, Second Series; and _The Jolly Juggler_, Third Series.] [Footnote 3: Vol. v. p. 182.] INTRODUCTION TO THE ROBIN HOOD BALLADS ‘It is our olde manner,’ sayd Robyn, ‘To leve but lytell behynde.’ ‘It will scarcely be expected that one should be able to offer an authentic narrative of the life and transactions of this extraordinary personage. The times in which he lived, the mode of life he adopted, and the silence or loss of contemporary writers, are circumstances sufficiently favourable, indeed, to romance, but altogether inimical to historical truth.’ In these words Joseph Ritson, the first and most painstaking of those well-meaning scholars who have tried to associate the outlaw with ‘historical truth,’ begins his ‘Life of Robin Hood,’ an account which occupies ten pages of his book, and is annotated and illustrated through the following one hundred and five pages. The _Dictionary of National Biography_ includes Robin Hood, as it includes King Arthur; but it is better to face the truth, and to state boldly that Robin Hood the yeoman outlaw never existed in the flesh. As the goddess Athena sprang from the head of Zeus, Robin Hood sprang from the imagination of the English people. That being so, he is a creation of whom the English people, who have kept him so long alive where he was born and bred, should be proud; and after reflecting on his essential characteristics--his love of the poor, his courteous robbery of the higher orders both spiritual and temporal, his loyalty to the king, his freedom with the king’s deer, and his esteem of all women for the sake of the Virgin--an Englishman should be the first to resent any attempt to identify so truly popular a hero either with one of several historical nonentities, or with a member of the aristocracy, or worst of all, with an Aryan sun-myth.