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which the presence of Nature in her sublimer aspects 

 is calculated to inspire. If the fox- hunter has counties 

 to scour, we have islands ; if we want his woodlands 

 and rivers, we have our rocks and ocean ; instead of 

 chargers, we have boats the finest in the world, 

 combining symmetry, safety, and celerity. Our dogs 

 are far superior in definite attachment and versatile 

 intelligence to the machines of the pack ; if we do not 

 enjoy the pleasure of breaking our necks in leaping 

 hedges, we can yet prove our mortality by capering 

 over precipices, breasting billows and ploughing 

 breakers. Yet some there are who call themselves 

 sportsmen, who, if they have not a partridge and 

 pointer, a pack and a brush, to look upon, consider all 

 hunts as unworthy of attention. Not so thought such 

 veterans as Sparmann and Cartwright, Lloyd and 

 Waterton : for it is not the name of an object of game, 

 whether this be fox or phoca, deer or tiger, but that 

 which can afford best play to those faculties and 

 associations which he loves best to exercise and to 

 cherish, that delights the soul of the true amateur 

 hunter. Nor can I enter into the feelings of those 

 sportsmen whose pleasure is solely in dexterous 

 killing; there should be the accessories of objects, 

 such as science, utility, health, to entitle us to deprive 

 an animal of life ; we are made lords of the irrational 

 creatures but not to lord it over them. I have re- 

 peatedly had for half-an-hour, under aim of an unerring 

 gun, a seal lying within forty yards of me, and could 

 not find it in my heart to fire ; yet I had enjoyed all 



