HISTORY AND LITERATURE. 3 



a vain thing, so the more excuse may there be for gathering 

 up into one convenient compass the scattered records of its 

 ancient and honourable past. That we shall find anything new 

 to say of it either historically or, if the word may serve, scien- 

 tifically, we may hardly hope. Though it is certainly true, 

 as Gervase Markham observed on a somewhat similar occasion, 

 that 'Time (which is the mother of experience) doth in our 

 labours show us more new and more nearer ways to our ends 

 than at the first we conceive,' still, since he discoursed on the 

 arts of hunting and of ' riding great horses,' so many men have 

 followed in his steps, that it would be a bold spirit indeed who 

 should sit down now to such a theme with the assurance that 

 he had anything fresh to offer either to the knowledge of the 

 veteran or the curiosity of the tyro. A 'Country Gentleman,' 

 writing little more than a century ago, found himself constrained 

 to admit, ' there hath already (by many well-experienced men) 

 been so much written of this subject that I know not well what 

 to write, except I should in some sort repeat another man's 

 tale.' Nevertheless the literature of hunting is of many 

 kinds. To present in a convenient shape the best, to use the 

 fashionable phrase of criticism, of all that has been thought 

 and said on the subject, is the prime purpose of our book. If 

 so far we shall be held in some sort to have succeeded, we shall 

 trust to be excused for having added one more to the many 

 volumes that have been written on a sport which one of its 

 most honourable chroniclers has declared to be ' most royal for 

 the stateliness thereof, most artificial for the wisdom and 

 cunning thereof, and most manly and warlike for the use and 

 endurance thereof 



We do not propose to begin, as children love to have their 

 stories told them, at the very beginning. Writers of all sorts 

 and conditions, from the gravest, have not disdained to record 

 the pleasures of the chase, and to expound its mysteries. From 

 Xenophon to Major Whyte-Melville, from Oppian to Mr. 

 Bromley- Davenport, from Dame Juliana Berners to the curious 

 individual known to men and columns as ' Ouida,' the list is 



B 2 



