2 HUNTING. 



when the brutality of field-sports is being denounced with so 

 much eloquence and energy that one cannot but wonder how 

 the world has remained unconvinced through so many years, 

 it is, perhaps, idle to speculate how much longer our attention 

 will be suffered to employ itself on a pastime which so many 

 wise men have agreed to brand as wanton and debasing. A 

 sort of melancholy pleasure, therefore, has attended the re- 

 searches into which our studies have led us. ' Still distant the 

 day,' about a quarter of a century ago sang Egerton Warburton, 

 that Homer of the hunting-field, 



Still distant the day, yet in ages to come, 



When the gorse is uprooted, the foxhound is dumb. 



When that race of 'harmless vegetarians,' for whom Mr. 

 Froude anticipates the mastery of the world, shall have come 

 into their kingdom, then Nimrod will no doubt be dead as Pan, 

 and the sports of the field as much an old-world story as the 

 'bloody laws' of the Roman circus. Those days, however, 

 are not yet. This pious crusade against sport is, after all, no 

 new thing. Even in this small matter we are not really refining 

 on the morals and manners of our fathers. 



The man who plants cabbages imitates, too ! 



That member for County Waterford, who, as he himself has 

 told us from his place in Parliament, once and only once 

 joined in the cruel game, and then on the side not of the 

 hunters but the hunted does not he find his prototype in 

 Master Harry Sandford, whose valorous defiance of a whole 

 field of brutal huntsmen brought a horsewhip across his 

 shoulders, and tears into our ingenuous eyes? Nay, we may 

 go farther back still ; we may go back to the eleventh century, 

 and to Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, of whom we read 

 in Mr. Green's ' History of the English People,' that when 

 once a hunted hare took refuge under his horse, 'his gentle 

 voice grew loud as he forbade the huntsmen to stir in the 

 chase while the creature darted off again to the woods.' 



As to speak of hunting, then, in the future may seem but 



