is nothing historical about Robin Hood.  Langland, in the fourteenth century, mentions “rhymes of Robin Hood”; and efforts have been made to identify him with one of the dispossessed followers of Simon de Montfort, in “the Barons’ War,” or with some still earlier free-booter, of Hereward’s time, who had taken to the woods and lived by plundering the Normans.  Myth as he is, he is a thoroughly national conception.  He had the English love of fair play; the English readiness to shake hands and make up when worsted in a square fight.  He killed the King’s venison, but was a loyal subject.  He took from the rich and gave to the poor, executing thus a kind of wild justice.  He defied legal authority in the person of the proud sheriff of Nottingham, thereby appealing to that secret sympathy with lawlessness which marks a vigorous, free yeomanry.[32] He had the knightly virtues of courtesy and hospitality, and the yeomanly virtues of good temper and friendliness.  And finally, he was a mighty archer with the national weapons, the long-bow and the cloth-yard shaft; and so appealed to the national love of sport in his free and careless life under the greenwood tree.  The forest scenery give a poetic background to his exploits, and though the ballads, like folk-poetry in general, seldom linger over natural descriptions, there is everywhere a consciousness of this background and a wholesome, outdoor feeling: 

    “In somer, when the shawes be sheyne,
      And leves be large and long,
    Hit is full mery in feyre foreste
      To here the foulys song: 

    “To se the dere draw to the dale,
      And leve the hillis hee,
    And shadow hem in the leves grene,
      Under the grene-wode tre."[33]

Although a few favorite ballads such as “Johnnie Armstrong,” “Chevy Chase,” “The Children in the Wood,” and some of the Robin Hood ones had long been widely, nay almost universally familiar, they had hardly been regarded as literature worthy of serious attention.  They were looked upon as nursery tales, or at best as the amusement of peasants and unlettered folk, who used to paste them up on the walls of inns, cottages, and ale-houses.  Here and there an educated man had had a sneaking fondness for collecting old ballads—­much as people nowadays collect postage stamps.  Samuel Pepys, the diarist, made such a collection, and so did John Selden, the great legal antiquary and scholar of Milton’s time.  “I have heard,” wrote Addison, “that the late Lord Dorset, who had the greatest wit tempered with the greatest candor, and was one of the finest critics as well as the best poets of his age, had a numerous collection of old English ballads, and a particular pleasure in the reading of them.  I can affirm the same of Mr. Dryden.”  Dryden’s “Miscellany Poems” (1684) gave “Gilderoy,” “Johnnie Armstrong,” “Chevy Chase,” “The Miller and the King’s Daughter,” and “Little Musgrave and the Lady Barnard.”  The last