tlbe 1bon. (5rantle Jf. JBerftcle^ 479 



when a boy ; and this fondness for the most trivial sport 

 I treasure, for it would be melancholy to find that, one 

 by one, the humours of youth were departing. Enough 

 alas ! will depart, whether we like it or not, that once 

 rendered life agreeable : I therefore bid the ageing and 

 aged, as the might of their limbs leaves them, to cling, 

 if they can, to the calm contemplation of nature ; to the 

 singing bird, the flower, and the fossil. To see an old 

 beau, with a bald head bobbing about like an apple on 

 the sea, or a dreadful wig, dancing, anxious to leave the 

 ball before daylight and the growth of the white stubble 

 on his chin contrasts with the deadly hue of his stained 

 and blue-tinted whiskers that ' ruling passion strong in 

 death/ used to be to me, as a young man, so dis- 

 gusting, that, long before I had a white hair in my 

 head, I resolved such a sin should never be laid at my 

 door." 



To my thinking Grantley Berkeley never showed to 

 more advantage than in the decline of his life. There 

 had come to him, as there comes to all true sportsmen, 

 a time when the lust for slaughter died out, and was 

 succeeded by a love for all the wild things that he had 

 hunted and shot. To watch their ways, to study their 

 habits, to win their confidence became with him a far 

 greater pleasure than the exercise of his skill in slaying 

 them. Down there in the seclusion of his Dorsetshire 

 home at Alderney Manor, among his books and pictures 

 and dogs and birds he made for himself a little sports- 

 man's paradise. He gave sanctuary to pheasants, 

 partridges, and wild-fowl innumerable till they grew as 

 tame as pigeons. He acclimatised some rare species of 



