8 WILLIAM SCROPE 



no idle moment for milkmaids and syllabubs ; informa- 

 tion and instruction must be compressed into business- 

 like paragraphs. 



Heaven forbid that we should revive the dear shades! 

 This is no scene for them. We have no time to waste 

 with Theophilus while, ' lest precipitancy spoil his 

 sport, he preponders his rudiments,' nor patience for 

 Richard Franck while he ' expostulates the antiquities 

 of Kilmarnock' when we want to read about fishing. 

 Nevertheless, there are moments when it is good to 

 meet with a sportsman who retains traces of a liberal 

 education, who does not make us shiver by treating 

 ' lay ' as an intransitive verb, and enriches his narrative 

 with observations on character and scenery. Such a 

 writer is William Scrope, whose whole literary works 

 are comprised in two rather brief and very charming 

 volumes The Art of Deer-stalking and Days and 

 Nights of Salmon Fishing. If ever there were an 

 exception to Dr. Johnson's dogma, that none but a 

 blockhead ever wrote except for money, this writer 

 were he. Scrope, the owner of Castle Combe, in 

 Wiltshire, the last male representative of the historic 

 Lords Scrope of Bolton, was of perfectly independent 

 means, and wrote, as he painted, purely as an amateur 

 out of love of the art. Sir Walter Scott pronounced 

 'the little artist' as he calls him in his journal to be 

 'one of the best amateur painters I ever saw, Sir 

 George Beaumont scarcely excepted ' ; but Scott was 

 sleeping in Dryburgh before The Art of Deer-stalking 

 was written. By that time Scrope, having had experi- 



