HUNTING OF SEALS. 47 



instead of chargers, we have boats the finest in the world, 

 combining symmetry, safety, and celerity. Our dogs are 

 far superior in definite attachment and versatile intelligence 

 to the machines of the pack ; if we do not enjoy the pleasure 

 of breaking our necks in leaping hedges, we can yet prove 

 our mortality by capering over precipices, breasting billows, 

 and ploughing breakers ; no spring-guns, fierce keepers, or 

 game-laws, restrict the freedom of our coursing ; whatever 

 we behold either on the land or the water we can approach. 

 Yet some there are who call themselves sportsmen, who, if 

 they have not a partridge and pointer, a pack and a Brush, 

 to look upon, consider all hunts as unworthy of attention. 

 Not so thought such veterans as Sparmann and Cartwright, 

 Lloyd and Waterton ; for it is not the name of an object 

 of game, whether this be fox or phoca, deer or tiger, but 

 that which can afford best play to those faculties and asso- 

 ciations which he loves best to exercise and to cherish, that 

 delights the soul of the true amateur hunter. Nor can I 

 enter into the feelings of those sportsmen whose pleasure is 

 solely in dexterous killing ; there should be the accessories 

 of objects, such as science, utility, health, to entitle us to 

 deprive an animal of life ; we are made lords of the irra- 

 tional creatures, but not to lord it over them. I have re- 

 peatedly had for half an hour, under aim of an unerring- 

 gun, a seal lying within forty yards of me, and could not find 

 it in my heart to fire ; yet I had enjoyed all the enthusiasm 

 of the hunt up to the moment of slaying, and this unalloyed 

 pleasure in addition, of quietly observing the drowsy Triton 

 reposing on his ocean rock, like an ancient Sea- King in his 

 stronghold of plunder (Pictish Brugh),* when, withdrawing 



* Various considerations tend to shew that the ancient erections 

 termed Pictish Brughs, were fortified depots of plunder of the Vikingr, 

 but not the possessions of the aborigines of tbe countries where they 



