文档介绍：The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood
by Howard Pyle
PREFACE
FROM THE AUTHOR TO THE READER
You who so plod amid serious things that you feel it shame to give
yourself up even for a few short moments to mirth and joyousness
in the land of Fancy; you who think that life hath nought to do with
innocent laughter that can harm no one; these pages are not for you.
Clap to the leaves and go no farther than this, for I tell you plainly
that if you go farther you will be scandalized by seeing good,
sober folks of real history so frisk and caper in gay colors and motley
that you would not know them but for the names tagged to them.
Here is a stout, lusty fellow with a quick temper, yet none so ill
for all that, who goes by the name of Henry II. Here is a fair,
gentle lady before whom all the others bow and call her
Queen Eleanor. Here is a fat rogue of a fellow, dressed up in rich
robes of a clerical kind, that all the good folk call my Lord Bishop
of Hereford. Here is a certain fellow with a sour temper and a grim look--
the worshipful, the Sheriff of Nottingham. And here, above all,
is a great, tall, merry fellow that roams the greenwood and joins
in homely sports, and sits beside the Sheriff at merry feast, which same
beareth the name of the proudest of the s--Richard of
the Lion's Heart. Beside these are a whole host of knights,
priests, nobles, burghers, yeomen, pages, ladies, lasses, landlords,
beggars, peddlers, and what not, all living the merriest of merry lives,
and all bound by nothing but a few odd strands of certain old ballads
(snipped and clipped and tied together again in a score of knots)
which draw these jocund fellows here and there, singing as they go.
Here you will find a hundred dull, sober, jogging places, all tricked out with
flowers and what not, till no one would know them in their fanciful dress.
And here is a country bearing a well-known name, wherein no chill mists
press upon our spirits, and no rain falls but what roll