Wflltam Scrope 419 



society was calculated to drive dull care away they were 

 William Scrope and Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. 



Scrope, in his " Art of Deer-stalking," quotes Sir 

 Walter as an authority on the excellence of Highland 

 venison, and writes as follows : 



" I have now lying before me a letter from Sir Walter 

 Scott, to whom I was in the habit of sending Highland 

 venison (and who was no mean judge of the merits of a 

 plat de resistance} attesting its excellence. Thus I quote 

 from it word for word : 



'Thanks, dear sir, for your venison, for finer or fatter 

 Never roam'd in a forest, or smoked in a platter. 



Your superb haunch arrived in excellent time to feast 



a new-married couple, the Douglasses of M , and 



was pronounced by far the finest that could by possibility 

 have been seen in Teviot-dale since Chevy Chase. I did 

 not venture on the carving, being warned both by your 

 hints, and the example of old Robert Sinclair, who used 

 to say that he had thirty friends during a fortnight's 

 residence at Harrowgate, and lost them all in the carving 

 of one haunch of venison : so I put Lockhart on the 

 duty, and, as the haunch was too large to require strict 

 economy, he hacked and hewed it well enough.' " 



In 1838 Scrope published his " Art of Deer-stalking," 

 the outcome of ten years' sport in the forest of Atholl. 

 For the Duke had constituted Scrope a sort of amateur 

 head gamekeeper, and the fortunate painter-sportsman, 

 luxuriously housed in Bruar Lodge, found himself 

 practically uncontrolled master of a vast tract of moor 

 and mountain forty miles long by eighteen broad 



