508 BRITISH SPOUTS AND PASTIMES. 



The higher classes would much more easily improve the habits of 

 the lower, by precepts than acts of parliament. Were they to aban- 

 don their barbarous sports, brutality would soon become unfashion- 

 able as a sovereign ingredient of pastime, even among the most dis- 

 solute and depraved. The desuetude of the stag-hunt would, in a 

 few years, be followed by the annihilation of badger-baiting. The 

 Sabbath dog-fights in the fields about London are kept up by the 

 flipping and figging of the Sunday morning lounge at Tattersall's, 

 and the Sunday evening sprees in St. Giles's by the Sunday evening 

 parties in St. James's. 



The subject of our paper demands a much more careful and elabo- 

 rate treatment than we can at present afford it. Our foregoing loose 

 remarks have arisen out of the perusal of three sporting books, all by 

 the same publisher, which reached us late in the month. Of these, 

 " The Field Book" possesses the greatest magnitude and the least 

 merit. It is disfigured by a sprinkling of wood-cuts, principally 

 copied from bad copies of Bewick, and disguised by some of the 

 small fry of Mr. Sears. In drawing and engraving they are pitiable 

 too deplorable to excite contempt. There is not one cut in the book for 

 which any man living, would give the one-hundreth fraction of a far- 

 thing. Nothing is depicted, and nothing even is caricatured that every 

 body has not seen caricatured a thousand times before, in Cock Robin 

 chronicles, stories of Jenny Wren, or little books about Bow-wow 

 and his Brothers. The artist (!) has taken any thing that came to 

 hand and badly copied it, adding a few scars in the scenery to make 

 it pass for his own. There is not a cut in the book that was wanted ; 

 there is not one that tells us any thing new that reveals an object 

 with which we were not previously much better acquainted than the 

 poor forlorn ignorant devil of a draughtsman. No research has been 

 employed ; nature has never been consulted, although game, during 

 the past season, might be had almost at any price offered. In fact 

 the cuts, from beginning to end, form so gross and glaring a humbug, 

 as only to be equalled by the accompanying letter-press. This, how- 

 ever for the consolation of Mr. Sears' apprentices, we beg to state, not 

 only equals, but beats them hollow, in " bitter badness." It is, without 

 exception, the most ignorant, impudent, presumptuous affair that ever 

 fell beneath our notice. The fellow who has fudged it up, is no more 

 fit to achieve a work of such pretensions than one of Barclay's dray- 

 men. The book, to our practised eye, looks as though it had been 

 done, by some forlorn hack, at fifteen shillings per sheet ! And done 

 it is, as we shall speedily shew, to all intents and purposes. 



It pretends to be a compendium, in an alphabetical form, of the 

 Sports and Pastimes of Great Britain. Among these sports and 

 pastimes we find, 



" GRUNT, v. to murmur like a hog." 



Of the substantives which our compiler has thought proper to 

 define, for the benefit of modern British sportsmen the Burdetts and 

 Beauforts of the age these are selections : Cow, s. the female of 

 the bull.- CATAPLASM, s. a poultice. CLERGY, s. a man in holy 



