names of some
of these persons, such as Thomas Churchyard, who is spoken of in "The
Return from Parnassus," attached to poems in Mr Collier's collection;
but we are compelled on perusal to acknowledge that there is much
justice in the critical decrees of time, and that very little which is
at all worthy of preservation has been silently permitted to perish. In
an aesthetical point of view, therefore, we cannot expect to derive much
advantage from this reprint of the Roxburghe broadsides. But the
antiquary, who has a natural taste for the cast-off raiment of the
world, will doubtless fasten upon the volume; and the critical
commentator may glean from it some scraps of obsolete information. To
them accordingly we leave it, and pass into the glades of Sherwood.

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 t