THE STAGHOUND 115 



However, I have levied upon other writers' researches and 

 recollections the odds and ends which seemed most likely 

 to season an excursion on the predecessors of the modern 

 staghound. From first to last, except some shreddy 

 personal experiences, there is nothing new nor original 

 about anything I have to say about these antiques. A 

 foot-note is not an enthusiastic expression of gratitude. 

 But I see no more handsome way of acknowledging the 

 heavy debt of gratitude I owe to the many excellent writers 

 whose works I have consulted. From some of these, en- 

 couraged by Mr. Fox's observation, that Hume's practice 

 of quoting from other writers gave an agreeable variety to 

 his style, I have here and there given passages in their 

 full text. 



Since Lord Wolverton's hounds were sold to go abroad, 

 and Mr. Thomas Nevill's pack was broken up by his death, 

 as far as I know there is no pack which can lay claim to 

 being distinctively staghounds.' Dr. Collyns writes in the past 



' According to Turberville, we owe the staghouud to one Brutus, who, having 

 got into serious trouble in Italy for killing his father, settled in Britain near 

 Totnes, and brought with him some hounds which were so staunch that, ' a 

 hart once found, they would never leave him till his death.' Brutus must have 

 been a country gentleman in advance of his time, for, notwithstanding the 

 graphic scraps in Horace, Od. i. 1, 25, Epist. i. 2, 65, the popular form of ' venatio ' 

 with the Eomans was the hunting spectacle, in which hundreds and sometimes 

 thousands of wild animals were slaughtered in the amphitheatre to gratify the 

 l^opulace. It seems to have come at last, in the days of the Empire, to jjure 

 delight in shedding blood, e.g. King Bocchus sent 100 lions to Kome in Sylla's 

 prajtorship, ' with the proper number of javelin men to destroy them' in the 

 circus. Sometimes a number of large trees torn up by the roots were planted 

 in the circus, and the less savage animals being admitted into this extemporised 

 forest were given up to the people, who were allowed to rush into the arena and 

 carry off what they could. At the consecration of the Amphitheatre of Titus, 

 5,000 wild beasts and 4,000 tame animals were killed. At a venatio given by 

 Probus there were 1,000 ostriches, 1,000 stags, 1,000 boars, 1,000 deer slaugh- 

 tered, and on the following day 100 lions and 100 lionesses, 100 leopards and 

 300 bears, and we hear of a hippopotamus and live crocodiles in tanks in the 

 amphitheatre, eighteen elephants, camelopai'ds and giraffes (Scaurus, b.c. 58), 

 a python sixty cubits long, and thirty-six crocodiles contributing at different 

 times to the po^^ularity of Empire (Augustus, 29 b.c). 



I 2 



