his marriage with Rowena; and surely the boast
of his eating propensities, when he shows himself to his astonished
mourners escaped from the death and tomb prepared for him, is unnatural,
and throws a contempt and ridicule over the whole scene. Richard and
Robin Hood (or Locksley) are not characters of Sir Walter's
creation--Richard is, we may suppose, truly portrayed. My friend S----,
Eusebius, who, while I was suffering under influenza, read these novels
out to me, was offended at a little passage towards the end, where the
author steps out of the action of his dramatic piece, to tell you that
King Richard did not live to fulfil the benevolent promises he had a
line or two before been making; and I entirely agree with S----, and
felt the unseemly and untimely intelligence as he read it. This would
scarcely be justifiable in a note, but in the body of the work it shocks
as a plague-spot on the complexion of health. This practice, too common
in novelists, especially the "historical," becoming their own marplots,
deserves censure. To borrow from another art, it is like marring a
composition, by an uncomfortable line or two running out of the picture,
and destroying the completeness. I know not if that fine scene, perhaps
the most masterly in Ivanhoe, has ever been painted, where, after the
defeat of De Bois-Guilbert, and after that Richard had broken in upon
the court, the Grand Master draws off in the repose of stern submission
his haughty Knights Templars. The slow procession finely contrasts with
the taunting violence of Richard; and what a background is offered to
the painter--the variously moved multitude, the rescued Rebecca, and the
dead (though scarcely defeated) Templar!

Sir Walter, although an antiquarian, was not perhaps aware that he was
somewhat out in his chronology in connecting Robin Hood and his men with
Richard the First. It is made very clear in an able essay in the
_Westminster Review_, that Robin Hood's name and fame did not commence
till after the defeat of Simon de Montfort in the battle of Evesham. In
fact, Robin Hood was more of a political outlaw--one of the outlawed,
after that defeat, than a mere sylvan robber. Sir Walter Scott has taken
advantage of the general belief, gathered from many of our old ballads,
in an intercourse between Robin Hood and England's king. But according
to the oldest of the ballads, (or rather poems, for it is too long for a
ballad, and composed of many parts,) _The Ly