22 MANUAL FOR YOUNG SPORTSMEN. 



possession of the popular heart, in every land which yielded 

 to the sway of those warrior and hunter races. 



And to this day, wherever a drop is to be found of that 

 fierce Northern blood surviving in the people's veins, there 

 you will find, and in no other land, the passion for the 

 chase alive and dominant. 



In southern Europe, in the nations which speak the 

 soft bastard Latin, in Italy, Spain, Portugal, the shores 

 and isles of the Mediterranean, there is no hunter-spirit in 

 the people ; and even where the chase has been attempted, 

 as a regal pastime, by the rulers and the princes of the 

 lands, it has fallen dull and ineffectual, a mere mimicry 

 and simulacrum, of the genuine sport, and no more like 

 the real hunts-up, "than I to Hercules." 



In the Teutonic wolds and woodlands, on the con- 

 trary, on the bleak mountain-tops and misty moors of 

 Scotia, in the deep green morasses of Hibernia, in the re- 

 joicing valleys, over the breezy downs, in the time-honored 

 forests of old England, among the perpetual snows of the 

 frore and frozen Alps, upon the broad and burnt karroos 

 of southern Africa, among Australian gum-trees or Cana- 

 dian pine-woods ; from the ghauts, from the grand peaks 

 of the Himalayas, to the stern flanks of the Rocky Moun- 

 tains and the skirts of the American salt desert, how gen- 

 uinely, how spontaneously burns the hunter ardor of the 

 Norse populations. 



So long as Britain remained provincial, the inhabitants 

 having become almost entirely Romanized, during four 

 centuries of subjugation, the chase, if it were followed at 

 all, was but a desultory, casual and unsystematic pastime , 



