184: COVERT-SIDE SKETCHES. 



altlioiigh I have known the latter run the field and the greater 



part of the pack out of scent and sight. 



Those old heroes liked the venison well enough, and got it 



either by fair means or foul. Yirgil, in the First Book of the 



^neid, anticipated Scroope something like eighteen centuries 



where he says, — 



But on the plain 

 Three beamy stags command a lordly train 

 Of branching heads ; the more ignoble throng 

 Attend their stately steps, and slowly graze along. 

 He stood, and while secure they fed below. 

 He took the quiver and the trusty bow 

 Achates used to bear : the leaders first 

 He laid along, and then the vulgar pierced j 

 Nor ceased his ariows till the shady plain 

 Sev'n mighty bodies with their blood distain. 



Even Captain Eoss, or the late Lord Henry Bentinck, would 

 have called that a fair day's work with the rifle, to say nothing 

 of killing such a holocaust with a bow and arrows. !N"o doubt, 

 in his case, the necessity condoned such wholesale slaughter, 

 but in later times the lords of the creation have been fain to 

 kill for killing sake alone. 



We get into the middle ages before we find deer regularly 

 hunted to their death. Even then I fancy they had to run the 

 gauntlet of arrows, cross-bows, and so forth, ere they got a fair 

 start, and occasionally had a brace of deer greyhounds laid on 

 close to their haunches as they broke covert. Hunted, however, 

 they were, beyond all doubt, as we learn that King Kichard the 

 Eirst chased a stag from Sherwood Eorest to Barnsdale, in 

 Yorkshire, and this must have been done by scent, as at the 

 23ace greyhounds or gazehounds would drive a stag, neither he 

 nor his pursuers could last for any number of miles. When the 

 present system first obtained it is now impossible to determine, 

 but we know that, in the days of Gervase Markham, hunting at 

 force, as it was called, which meant without the bounds of a 

 mark or other enclosed space set apart for the purpose, was 



