JANUARY 9 



ence of ten years in the forest of Athol, was well 

 qualified to undertake the first treatise ever published 

 on killing red deer with the rifle. Nevertheless, he 

 did so with a degree of trepidation which seldom 

 interferes with the scribbling of smaller men. He 

 remembered how, thirty years before, Scott had slated 

 Colonel Thornton in the Edinburgh Review 



' " Shall a poaching, hunting, or hawking squire presume to 

 trespass on the fields of literature ? " These words, or others 

 of similar import, I remember to have encountered in one 

 of our distinguished reviews. They ring still in my ears, 

 and fill me with apprehension as it is ; but they would alarm 

 me much more if I had attempted to put my foot within the 

 sacred enclosures alluded to ... Literature 1 Heaven help 

 us ! far from it : I have no such presumption : I have 

 merely attempted to describe a very interesting pursuit as 

 nearly as possible in the style and spirit in which I have 

 seen it carried out.' 



In spite of this disclaimer, Scrope, who was a well- 

 educated, widely-read traveller, must have had some 

 suspicion that he was producing something better than 

 the stuff which passed for sporting literature during 

 the first half of this century. What Apperley, writing 

 as ' Nhnrod,' had done for fox-hunting, Scrope did, and 

 may have intended to do, for deer-stalking and salmon- 

 fishing. Like Nimrod, he always had a quotation from 

 the classics ready; this was the recognised elegancy of an 

 age when the House of Commons would listen patiently 

 to lengthy extracts from the ^Eneid. Field sports had 

 long been the monopoly of hard-drinking squires and 



