4 COVERT-SIDE SKETCHES. 



late years powerful pens have been lifted up in its disparage- 

 ment, and amongst a certain section of the community there has 

 arisen a morbid tendency to decry sport as a relic of barbarism, 

 unsuited to the refinement and civilization of the present age. 

 Beneath such doctrines, while the English character remains as it 

 ever has been and now is, there lurks a danger which, perchance, 

 the promulgators of them would themselves be the last to detect. 

 It is the love of sport which makes deer-stealers, and poachers ; 

 and I firmly believe that — thieves, drunkards, and blackguards, 

 perhaps murderers, as they often end by becoming — nine out of 

 ten of these men are at the commencement merely keen sports- 

 men, who have no way of indulging what is to them an appetite 

 as natural as eating. Could their energies have been directed 

 into a right channel, and they had become huntsmen, keepers, 

 earth-stoppers, or found some employment of that sort, a very 

 different fate may have awaited them. 



Having briefly glanced at sport as it stands in public estima- 

 tion in the present day, let me more particularly turn to the 

 chase, as hunting is now termed, in contradiction to shooting or 

 coursing. Be it understood that, in the present sketches of the 

 sport, I by no means intend to tread on the domain of those 

 masters of the art — Beckford, !N"imrod,Delme-Eadcliffe, Scrutator, 

 Stonehenge, and hosts of other writers — who have gone before, 

 and instruct my readers in the art and mystery of hound- 

 breeding and kennel management, or the breeding, breaking, 

 and education of hunters. My endeavour in the following 

 pages is to amuse rather than instruct ; at the same time, by 

 touching on points in connexion with hounds and hunting that 

 have been passed over by most of the writers named, perchance 

 as too trivial for their notice, but which have materially added 

 to my own pleasure in the field, I hope, that to some of my 

 readers, should they not already have made the same observa- 

 tions for themselves, the perusal of this may be the means of 

 adding fresh pleasure in the pursuit. It is perhaps very heterodox 

 to say so, but I think, with all our present love of the chase, the 



