Then he besought Robin of Huntingdon, the jolly outlaw, nathless, to join him, and go to the help of their fair sire King Richard, with a score or two of lances.  But the Earl of Huntingdon was a very different character from Robin Hood the forester.  There was no more conscientious magistrate in all the county than his lordship:  he was never known to miss church or quarter-sessions; he was the strictest game-proprietor in all the Riding, and sent scores of poachers to Botany Bay.  “A man who has a stake in the country, my good Sir Wilfrid,” Lord Huntingdon said, with rather a patronizing air (his lordship had grown immensely fat since the King had taken him into grace, and required a horse as strong as an elephant to mount him)—­“a man with a stake in the country ought to stay in the country.  Property has its duties as well as its privileges, and a person of my rank is bound to live on the land from which he gets his living.”

“’Amen!” sang out the Reverend ——­ Tuck, his lordship’s domestic chaplain, who had also grown as sleek as the Abbot of Jorvaulx, who was as prim as a lady in his dress, wore bergamot in his handkerchief, and had his poll shaved and his beard curled every day.  And so sanctified was his Reverence grown, that he thought it was a shame to kill the pretty deer, (though he ate of them still hugely, both in pasties and with French beans and currant-jelly,) and being shown a quarter-staff upon a certain occasion, handled it curiously, and asked “what that ugly great stick was?”

Lady Huntingdon, late Maid Marian, had still some of her old fun and spirits, and poor Ivanhoe begged and prayed that she would come and stay at Rotherwood occasionally, and egayer the general dulness of that castle.  But her ladyship said that Rowena gave herself such airs, and bored her so intolerably with stories of King Edward the Confessor, that she preferred any place rather than Rotherwood, which was as dull as if it had been at the top of Mount Athos.

The only person who visited it was Athelstane.  “His Royal Highness the Prince” Rowena of course called him, whom the lady received with royal honors.  She had the guns fired, and the footmen turned out with presented arms when he arrived; helped him to all Ivanhoe’s favorite cuts of the mutton or the turkey, and forced her poor husband to light him to the state bedroom, walking backwards, holding a pair of wax-candles.  At this hour of bedtime the Thane used to be in such a condition, that he saw two pair of candles and two Ivanhoes reeling before him.  Let us hope it was not Ivanhoe that was reeling, but only his kinsman’s brains muddled with the quantities of drink which it was his daily custom to consume.  Rowena said it was the crack which the wicked Bois Guilbert, “the Jewess’s other lover, Wilfrid my dear,” gave him on his royal skull, which caused the Prince to be disturbed so easily; but added, that drinking became a person of royal blood, and was but one of the duties of his station.