268 SEPTEMBER. 



which merely pictures the same thing to his eye, 

 is a sufficient refutation of such a notion. His 

 every-day actions and words are denials of it. 

 He couches down for a momentary rest on the hill- 

 side, where the country opens before him in picto- 

 rial loveliness. He flies from the pelting shower to 

 the hut or tree, and recounts at eve by his own fire- 

 side, with his dogs basking on the hearth before 

 him, his whole day's round of adventure, with every 

 outward expression of enthusiasm, with such happy 

 and picturesque phrases, as often make the places 

 he speaks of rise up before you, and with an inward 

 glow of happiness that exclaims to itself " This is 

 life I" I know that such are his feelings, and there- 

 fore, notwithstanding that his pursuit cannot be 

 totally exempt from the charge of cruelty, it is 

 impossible not to sympathise with him. Yet, to 

 my thinking, shooting is, of all field-sports, the least 

 cruel ; the brutal mind will exhibit its ferocity in 

 every thing, and in nothing has that brutality been 

 more evinced than in that wholesale butchery which 

 many gentlemen have, of late years, thought fit to 

 boast of in the newspapers, deeming it an honour 

 to slaughter some hundred brace of birds in a day; 

 but the humane and practised sportsman, led on, 

 not by a blood-thirstiness worthy of a Cossack, 

 nor by vanity worthy of an idiot, nor by the plea- 

 sure of seeing an unfortunate animal run gasping 

 before the jaws of his enemies, and suffer at every 

 step a death of fear, but by the desire of a healthful 

 recreation, will single out his victim and destroy it 



