We wonder whether "Robin Hood, that archer good," is as great a favourite in the nursery now as he was in our younger days? We are afraid not. Our Robin was a mysterious sort of personage, something between an outlaw and an earl,--a kind of Judge Lynch, who distributed arbitrary justice beneath the shade of an enormous oak-tree, and who was perpetually confiscating the moveables of abbots for the exclusive benefit of the poor. Maid Marian we could never distinctly realise. Sometimes she appeared to us as a soft flaxen-haired beauty, not unlike a lay-figure, once the property of Mr Giannetti, which we loved in our youth, and to whose memory we still are constant. Green as emerald was the garb she wore, and the sun loved to shine upon her as she glided from the shadow of the trysting-tree. But then this fairy personage did not tally well with the other figures of the group. We could not conceive her associating familiarly with the gaunt but good-natured Scathelock, and Mutch the miller's son. Summer, too, must pass away from Sherwood as it does from every sublunary scene. The leaves fall--the birds are mute--the grass has withered down--and there is snow lying two feet deep in the forest,--and then, wo is me for poor Marian, shivering in her slight silken kirtle in the midst of a faded bower! So that we were sometimes compelled per-force to change our fancy, metamorphose Marian into a formidable Girzy, and provide her with a suit of linsey-woolsey against the weather, and a pair of pattens big enough to have frightened all the fallow-deer of the forest with their clatter. Ivanhoe, however, has played the deuce with our ideal creations, and Robin Hood is now fixed to us for ever in the guise of the yeoman Locksley. We do not like him half so well as we did before. He has, in some degree, compromised his character as an outlaw, by entering into an arrangement with him of the Lion-heart, and he now shoots deer under cover of the kingly license. The old warfare between Little John and the Sheriff of Nottingham is over, and the amicable diacylon conceals the last vestige of their feud. Allan-a-Dale has become a gentleman, and Friar Tuck laid down the quarter-staff, if he has not taken up the breviary. But if any one wants to know bold Robin as he really was, let him straightway possess himself of those two delightful volumes for which we are indebted to Mr Gutch. We have here not only the consecutive series of ballads known as "The Lytell Geste of Robin Hode," but every ballad, tale, and song, relating to the famous outlaw; and the whole are beautifully illustrated. Mr Gutch thoroughly understands the duty of an editor, and has applied himself heart and soul to the task: in consequence, he has given us by far the best collection of English ballads which for years has issued from the press.