INTRODUCTION.

THE Author has ventured to appear before his readers in a new form in the present work, and can only hope that the fare he has provided will prove acceptable. Having won as much praise, as a rural sketcher, as might satisfy any one possessing even more than a moderate share of ambition, he trusts that he shall not be found fault with, for having placed a few figures in the fore-ground of his landscape.

In writing this work, the author has fulfilled one of his boyish wishes: for it was long a

dream of his youth to accomplish an undertaking, the scene of which should be fixed in Sherwood Forest, in the days of Robin Hood. How he has completed his task, it remains for others to decide; for he is not ignorant that his tiny footmarks have had to follow the deep imprint of a giant.

He has availed himself of much new matter for his subject, such, he believes, as no other writer has ever attempted to weave into a romance, namely, THE ANCIENT NORMAN FOREST LAWS.

It will be seen, in the perusal of this work, that (to the best of his ability) he has studied them carefully, not merely as a code of almost forgotten laws, but as to the effect such tyrannical mandates were likely to produce upon a brave, yet oppressed people. He may be wrong, but he has looked upon the Norman Forest Laws as being the cause of their own downfall, and sinking through that overbearing

and disproportioned weight by which their power was balanced; and, that when they began to fall, their very ruins hardened into one of those stepping-stones which led to the passing of MAGNA CHARTA.

Before commencing so great an undertaking as the present, the author spent some time in that national, and truly beneficial institution, the British Museum, and perused several scarce and ancient works, which gave him a great insight into the manners and customs of the period about which he has written. His learning only just served him to understand some old English book; so that many valuable documents, of which a scholar would have availed himself for the present task, were to him sealed books. Thus his Latin will always be found ready translated at the end of Johnson's Pocket Dictionary; the devices on the shields of his warriors will be easily deciphered; and his war-cries need no learned com

mentator. An early acquaintance with a rare black-letter edition of Chaucer, however, enabled him to master nearly all the difficulties that occur in reading the old English writers.

Although the author has attempted to give a quaintness to his dialogue, and to model his phrases as much after the old style as modern usage will permit, yet he has been careful in rejecting all such words as would need notes of explanation; or so contriving the arrangement, that the following sentence generally reveals the true meaning.

He deemed it necessary, in writing on so remote a period, that the language and similes should smack of another age; and that but few or no modern allusions should be put into the mouths of his characters. Thus many of our Saxon words become plain to almost every reader, through the very simplicity of the thoughts they express. Nor would any one, who has only slightly studied the manners and

customs of the period of which the author has written, make a throat-cutting, mail-covered old baron say, "Shall I have the pleasure of taking wine with you?" or ""Pon honour I cannot drink more." No! they drank healths out of cups deeper than their own helmetsswore by saints, whose names were as rugged as their own manners-uttered curses by the rood-and if they had fought in Palestine, died in full assurance of heaven, by trusting to the heathen blood they had shed.

An author, therefore, is compelled to blend his mind with the barbarous age; to divest his thoughts of modern imagery, and embellishments, so far as regards the external formation of his work; but even in these things, he trusts, that he has been careful never to caricature nature. The human passions must still remain the same-hope and fear, despair and love, revenge and hate, need not the key of learning to reveal their secrets. The materials