Hunting Terms, 
127 
1600, is so illustrative, and contains so much of the 
glossary of the stag-hunters, that quotation of it may not 
be out of place. The passage is purposely crowded with 
technical expressions, in order to confuse and put to 
silence the scholar, Academieo :— 
u Amoretto. It was my pleasure two dayes ago, to take a gallant 
leash of greyhounds, and into my fathers parke I went, accompanied 
with two or three noblemen of my neere acquaintance, desiring to 
shew them some of the sport: I caused the keeper to sever the rascall 
deere, from the bucks of the first head ; now sir, a bucke the first yeere 
is a fawne, the second yeare a pricket, the third yeare a sorell, the 
fourth yeare a soare, the fift a buck of the first head, the sixt yeare a 
compleat buck : as likewise your hart is the first yeare a calfe, the 
second yeare a brochet, the third yeare a spade, the fourth yeare a 
stagge, the fift yeare a great stagge, the sixt yeare a hart: as likewise 
the roe-bucke is the first yeare a kid, the second yeare a girl, the third 
yeare a hemuse, and these are your speciall beasts for chase, or, as we 
huntsmen call it, for venery. . . .Now sir, after much travel! we 
singled a buck, I rode that same time upon a roane gelding, and stood 
to intercept from the thicket: the buck broke gallantly ; my great 
swift being disadvantaged in his slip, was at the first behinde, marry, 
presently coted and out-stript them, when, as the hart presently de¬ 
scended to the river, and being in the water, proferd, and reproferd, and 
proferd againe : and at last he upstarted at the other side of the water, 
which we call soyle of the hart, and there other huntsmen met him 
with an addauntreley : we followed in hard chase for the space of eight 
houres, thrise our hounds were at default, then we cryed a slaine , 
streight so ho; through good reclaiming my faulty hounds found their 
game againe, and so went through the woods with gallant notice of 
musicke, resembling so many viols de gambo: at last the hart laid 
him downe, and the hounds seized upon him, he groned, and wept, 
and dyed. In good faith it made me weepe too, to think of Acteon’s 
fortune, which my Ovid speaks of.” (Dodsley’s Old Plays , vol. ix., 
ed. W. C. Hazlit, 1874.) 
In Love's Labour Lost the pedant Holofernes plays on 
the words pricket, sore , and sorel (Act iv. sc. 2). 
Ben Jonson has many hunting allusions. In his 
pretty pastoral fragment, The Sad Shepherd (i. 1), occurs 
the following:— 
