Maid Marian by Thomas Love Peacock (rooftoppers TXT) 📕

till Robin’s outlaw life have end. —Old Play.]

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“These byshoppes and these archbyshoppes Ye shall them bete and bynde,”

says Robin Hood, in an old ballad. Perhaps, however, thus is to be taken not in a literal, but in a figurative sense from the binding and beating of wheat: for as all rich men were Robin’s harvest, the bishops and archbishops must have been the finest and fattest ears among them, from which Robin merely proposes to thresh the grain when he directs them to be bound and beaten: and as Pharaoh’s fat kine were typical of fat ears of wheat, so may fat ears of wheat, mutatis mutandis, be typical of fat kine.]

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[ Alcofribas Nasier: an anagram of Francois Rabelais, and his assumed appellation.]