[70] Mr. Warton has mistaken and misprinted this line so as to make it absolute nonsense. “Is not my reason good? Good—even good—Robin Hood.” (His. En. po. vol. ii.) [71] Drayton’s Polyolbion, song 26, p. 122 (supra, p. vii.) [72] In Churchyard’s “Replication onto Camel’s Objections” he tells the latter: “Your knowledge is great, your judgement is good, The most of your study hath ben of Robyn Hood; And Bevys of Hampton, and syr Launcelot de Lake, Hath taught you full oft your verses to make.” [73] See the original story, in which two brothers, of whom one had wished for as many oxen as he saw stars, the other for a pasture as wide as the firmament, kill each other about the pasturage of the oxen (from Camer. oper. subscis. cent. 1, c. 92, p. 429), in Wanley’s Little World of Man, edition of 1774, p. 426. Camerarius, it seems, had the story from Scardeonius _de claris civibus Patavinis_, whence it is also related in the notes to Upton _de studio militari_; and an older, of the like kind, is in the Facetiæ of Poggius. [74] “Derry down is the burden of the old songs of the Druids sung by their Bards and Vaids, to call the people to their religious assemblys in the groves. Doire in Irish (the old Punic) is a grove: corrupted into derry. A famous Druid grove and academy at the place since called Londonderry from thence.”—MS. note by Dr. Stukeley, in his copy of Robin Hood’s Garland. “Paul, Paul, thou art beside thyself!” [75] Mr. Boyd, the famous preacher in Childsdale, finding that several of his hearers went away after the forenoon sermon, had this expression in his afternoon prayers: “Now, Lord, thou seest that many people go away from hearing thy Word; but had we told them stories of Robin Hood or Davie Lindsay, they had stayed; and yet none of these are near so good as thy Word that I preach” (Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence, 1714, p. 156). [76] The Bishop grows scurrilous. “I never heard,” says Coke, attorney-general, “that Robin Hood was a traitor, they say he was an outlaw.” (State Trials, i. 218.—Raleigh had said, “Is it not strange for me to make myself a Robin Hood, a Kett, or a Cade?”) [77] This ballad seems to have been written in imitation of a song in Heywood’s Rape of Lucrece, 1630, beginning— “The gentry to the King’s-head, The nobles to the crown,” &c. [78] In Arnold’s Essex Harmony (ii. 98) he gives the inscription, as a catch for three voices, of his own composition, thus: “My beer is stout, my ale is good, Pray stay and drink with Robin Hood; If Robin Hood abroad is gone, Pray stay and drink with Little John.” [79] This description is finely illustrated by an excellent woodcut at the head of one of Anthony a Wood’s old ballads in the Ashmoleian Museum. The frontispiece to Gervas Markham’s Archerie, 1634, is likewise a man drawing a bow.