264 A YEAR OF SPORT AND NATURAL HISTORY. 



The couplet has, for an epigram, a surplusage of ideas as well as 

 of feet, and would perhaps be better thus : 



" The hand that slew, a life-in-death did give ; 

 Together died we, and together live." 



Killing and conferring life is the gist of the epigram of Lord Jeffrey, 

 the great critic and Scotch Law Lord, who finds a fair pun in his 

 brief, and converts it very pleasantly into 



" The sculptor killed them with one shot ; 



And when the deed was done 

 He carved them first upon one toast, 

 And then upon one stone." 



There are two circumstances, however, which none of the 

 epigrammatists took into account. Being in the main bookish men, 

 they probably never knew that to shoot two Woodcocks by design 

 with one shot is as nearly a physical impossibility as anything done 

 with a gun can well be. Men are fabled to have killed two snipe, 

 meaning to, with a single shot, and I can almost believe it, for 

 snipe are often very thick on the ground, and they are found in 

 open country. I have myself known a Spaniard who frequently 

 killed two quails with one cartridge ; but the quail is a bird of the 

 open, too, its flight very direct, like a partridge's, and in August it 

 is extremely abundant in the maize-fields of Spanish Estremadura. 

 The Spaniard would cover his bird as it rose at his feet, and wait 

 till the last moment of its being within range on the chance of 

 another bird crossing the line of flight, and of his hitting both. 

 Sir Francis honestly admitted that the double shot was a " fluke " ; 

 he saw but one bird when he aimed. The other circumstance, 

 which the epigrammatists were too polite to record, or too art- 

 ignorant to perceive, is that Chantrey's carved effigy of the 

 Woodcocks is extraordinarily second-rate as a work of art, so that 



