294 



SHOOTING. 



There is something attractive to the imagina- 

 tion associated with the history of the ancient 

 British forests. A modern manor gives but a poor 

 idea of what a sporting territory once was. The 

 lord of a forest was a petty monarch ; he held his 

 courts, and tried his prisoners ; he dwelt, aloof 

 from towns and villages, embosomed amidst the 

 uninclosed moorlands and woodlands that sur- 

 rounded his castellated mansion, and war, love, 

 and sporting were his chief pursuits, the business 

 of his life. If there be now any remnant of the 

 semblance of ancient rural state, it must be looked 

 for in the establishment of some Scottish Lowland 

 chief or Highland laird. The age of civil wars, 

 chivalry, and feudal ceremony is gone ; but there 

 is much in Scotland to remind us of the days of 

 yore. The Highland noble the laird of an ex- 

 tensive but thinly populated district in his own 

 immediate neighbourhood is looked up to as a prince. 

 Mountain, river, lake, and glen are his ; his are 

 the ancestral forests, where the black, the red, and 

 the white grouse wing their flights, undisturbed by 

 the advances of civilisation, and the red deer and 

 roe-buck, unimpeded by fence or fastness, range at 

 will, the red deer on the unplanted waste, the 

 roe in the woods ! 



But to return. After the Forest Charter was 

 granted, any one was allowed to kill game, except 

 in certain privileged places. The places privileged 

 were of four descriptions, viz.aforest, a chase, a park, 

 and a warren. To these may be added a decoy for 

 water-fowl, which had also peculiar privileges. Of 



