Their amusements, as prescribed by statute, consisted in training themselves as soldiers.  In the prohibitions of the statutes we see also what their amusements were inclined to be.  But besides “the bowles and the claish,” field sports, fishing, shooting, hunting, were the delight of every one, and although the forest laws were terrible, they served only to enhance the excitement by danger.  Then, as now, no English peasant could be convinced that there was any moral crime in appropriating the wild game.  It was an offence against statute law, but no offence against natural law; and it was rather a trial of skill between the noble who sought to monopolise a right which seemed to be common to all, and those who would succeed, if they could, in securing their own share of it.  The Robin Hood ballads reflect the popular feeling and breathe the warm genial spirit of the old greenwood adventurers.  If deer-stealing was a sin, it was more than compensated by the risk of the penalty to which those who failed submitted, when no other choice was left.  They did not always submit, as the old northern poem shows of Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William of Cloudislee, with its most immoral moral; yet I suppose there was never pedant who could resist the spell of those ringing lines, or refuse with all his heart to wish the rogues success, and confusion to the honest men.

But the English peasantry had pleasures of less ambiguous propriety, and less likely to mislead our sympathies.  The chroniclers have given us many accounts of the masques and plays which were acted in the court, or in the castles of the noblemen.  Such pageants were but the most splendid expression of a taste which was national and universal.  As in ancient Greece, generations before the rise of the great dramas of Athens, itinerant companies wandered from village to village, carrying their stage furniture in their little carts, and acted in their booths and tents the grand stories of the mythology; so in England the mystery players haunted the wakes and fairs, and in barns or taverns, taprooms, or in the farmhouse kitchen, played at saints and angels, and transacted on their petty stage the drama of the Christian faith.  To us, who can measure the effect of such scenes only by the impression which they would now produce upon ourselves, these exhibitions can seem but unspeakably profane; they were not profane when tendered in simplicity, and received as they were given.  They were no more profane than those quaint monastic illuminations which formed the germ of Italian art; and as out of the illuminations arose those paintings which remain unapproached and unapproachable in their excellence, so out of the mystery plays arose the English drama, represented in its final completeness by the creations of a poet who, it now begins to be supposed, stands alone among mankind.  We allow ourselves to think of Shakspeare or of Raphael or of Phidias, as having accomplished their work by the power of their own