PARTRIDGE SHOOTING 



The net afforded facilities for choosing your birds when you 

 had got them. ' If,' says our authority, tactfully combining 

 appeal to our nobler feelings with reminder of material inter- 

 ests, ' you shall let go the old Cock and Hen, it will not only 

 be an act like a Gentleman, but a means to increase your 

 Pastime.' 



Shooting on the wing made progress in the early years of 

 the eighteenth century. By the year 1718 the long barrels of 

 a few years earlier had been discarded except for wild-fowl. 

 ' A Piece,' says Giles Jacob, ^ ' of about three foot and a half 

 long in the Barrel, by a more perfect mixture of the Metal and 

 skilful Boring will do more execution in the pursuit of Land 

 fowl than your long guns : and no body is unsensible but it is 

 less Labour and Fatigue to the Bearer.' So far as we can 

 gather from Jacob — a somewhat unsafe guide, as certain 

 passages in his book bear suspicious likeness to passages in 

 Sprint's — the sportsman had not yet acquired the habit of 

 picking his bird : but this improvement was not long to be 

 delayed. Nine years later Mr. Markland produced his poetic 

 discourse on shooting : ^ his Preface contains evidence that 

 picking one's bird was then quite a new idea in England : also 

 that the practice was not productive of satisfactory results. 

 Having discussed the curious moral effect of a first miss on the 

 whole day's performances (it seems, he says thoughtfully, to 

 result in ' a Disorder of the Animal Spirits occasioned by the 

 Original Disappointment '), he proceeds : — 



' I have often wondered why the French, of all Mankind, 

 should alone be so expert at the Gun, I had almost said in- 

 fallible. It 's as rare for a profess'd Marksman of that Nation 

 to miss a Bird as for one of Ours to kill. But, as I have been 

 since informed, they owe this Excellence to their Education, 

 They are train' d up to it so very young, that they are no more 

 surpriz'd or alarm'd with a Pheasant than with a Rattle-Mouse 

 [bat]. The best Field-Philosophers living: for they are always 

 there Masters of their Temper.' 



^ The Compleat Sportsman, 1718. ^ Pteryphlegia or the Art of Shooting Flying, 1727. 



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