3obn 1bolt, of TTottenbam 161 



almost impossible. I grant, too, that the skill required 

 in shooting driven game is far greater than was 

 demanded of the old-time sportsman for a rocketing 

 pheasant or a grouse, coming down the wind at the 

 rate of sixty miles an hour, is a hundred times harder 

 to hit than birds flushed within twenty or thirty yards 

 of the shooter over a steady brace of pointers or setters. 

 But where does the sport come in at these big shoots ? 

 The craze for enormous bags is a thing I cannot 

 reconcile with the spirit of true sportsmanship. To 

 me it seems a piece of vulgar brag a show got up 

 to advertise the prowess of individual shooters and the 

 head of game bred by big preservers. The lust for 

 slaughter and the pride in mere straight shooting 

 seem to me significant marks of a degeneracy in the 

 ideals of sport. But there is a " remnant " left who 

 have not bowed the knee to this modern Baal. You 

 will find good and true sportsmen among the new 

 school ; you may note their sober presence and work- 

 manlike air among the " smart " and dandy marksmen 

 at big shoots. But it is hardly there that I should 

 advise the sporting Diogenes to go in search of them. 

 He would need his lantern there ; he might dispense 

 with it, I think, if he went among the class to which 

 John Holt belonged, and to those remote and quiet 

 paradises of England where the old homely ideas of 

 sport still linger. 



