"In the very best of company," said the friar, "in the high
court of Nature, and in the midst of her own nobility.
Is it not so? This goodly grove is our palace:
the oak and the beech are its colonnade and its canopy:
the sun and the moon and the stars are its everlasting lamps:
the grass, and the daisy, and the primrose, and the violet,
are its many-coloured floor of green, white, yellow, and blue;
the may-flower, and the woodbine, and the eglantine, and the ivy,
are its decorations, its curtains, and its tapestry: the lark,
and the thrush, and the linnet, and the nightingale, are its
unhired minstrels and musicians. Robin Hood is king of the forest
both by dignity of birth and by virtue of his standing army:
to say nothing of the free choice of his people, which he
has indeed, but I pass it by as an illegitimate basis of power.
He holds his dominion over the forest, and its horned multitude
of citizen-deer, and its swinish multitude or peasantry
of wild boars, by right of conquest and force of arms.
He levies contributions among them by the free consent of
his archers, their virtual representatives. If they should find
a voice to complain that we are 'tyrants and usurpers to kill
and cook them up in their assigned and native dwelling-place,'
we should most convincingly admonish them, with point of arrow,
that they have nothing to do with our laws but to obey them.
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