416 HUNTING. 



from bodily exhaustion ; and it may be accounted 

 for by their being furnished with two spiracles, or 

 breathing places, one at the corner of each eye. 

 Oppian, the Greek poet, must have supposed, by 

 the following line, that they had/b^^r, 



which was a mistake of the sporting bard; and 

 some writers have made Aristotle say, that goats 

 breathed at their ears, whereas he directly asserts 

 the contrary. The classic writers, however, as well 

 as our own poets, have taken some of their most 

 beautiful similes from the chase of the deer. For 

 examples — VirgiFs comparing the flight of Turnus 

 to a stag trying to escape from the toils ; and the 

 death of the favourite hind by the hand of the 

 young lulus, a master-piece of pastoral poetry. 

 But the death of the stag has been a favourite 

 theme of our own poets ; and both Shakspeare and 

 Thomson have been equally happy in their de- 

 scription of the last moments of the antlered mo- 

 narch of the forest, the latter particularly : 



" He stands at bay, 

 And puts his last weak refuge in despair. 

 The big round tears run down his dappled face : 

 He groans in anguish ; whilst the growling pack, 

 Blood-happy, hang at his fair jutting chest, 

 And mark his beauteous chequer'd sides with gore." 



The following account of hunting the wild stag 

 in Devonshire, but now nowhere to be seen in Eng- 

 land, is from one of Nimrod's Tours, in 1824 : — 

 " The amusement of stag-hunting appears to be of 

 ancient date in the county of Devon. For many 



