TYROL AND x^THENS. 
21 
The affection of the mountaineers of the Tyrol for the despotic 
government of Austria is often spoken of. The Tyrolese hunts, 
loves, and sings, and his government guarantees to him the enjoy- 
ment of these three dearest rights. Why should he rebel ? But 
let the paternal government fancy to deprive the Tyrolese of the 
right of hunting, and we shall see fine play. 
The history of antiquity is as rich, perhaps more so than that 
of modern times, in materials capable of serving as basis and 
support to my thesis of the indissoluble union of the chase with 
liberty. 
The most noble and deserving people of antiquity, that which has 
illustrated all others, is the Athenian. Now these Athenians, so 
impassioned for liberty, for the enjoyments of the imagination, for 
glory and the arts, were pre-eminently the hunting people of 
Greece. And this fineness of sight, that made of the Athenians 
a nation so profoundly artistic, came precisely from its passion for 
the chase. I do not invent, I narrate. The assertion is Xeno- 
phon’s — ^Xenophon the great writer, the great captain, the great 
hunter, is that man of antiquity who best knows what he knows. 
Pausanias says, that the Athenians perceive distinctly, from the 
promontory of Sunium, the crest of the casque and the gilded 
steel of the pike with which the Minerva of the Acropolis is armed. 
The distance is forty kilometres (nearly twenty-three miles) 1 The 
Egynetes, who are only thirty kilometres (seventeen miles) from the 
Acropolis, see the handle of the spear move. The inhabitants of 
Athens, in their turn, distinguish perfectly, with the naked eye, the 
least details of the Temple of Jupiter, at Egina. The history of 
William Tell, and that of Leather Stocking, also called Hawkeye, 
confirm in every point the recital of Xenophon, who attributes the 
exquisite delicacy of the sense of sight among the Athenians to 
their passionate exercise of the right of hunting. 
Fenimore Cooper, the greatest historian of the chase in mod- 
ern times, goes farther than the Greek historian, when he asserts 
that the Mohicans will recognize the track of a bird in the air. 
Now how admirably all the arts are connected. 
The Athenians, a hunting people, are naturally possessed of an 
enthusiastic love of rural life. Their famous city is nothing but a 
