PRESIDENT-THE EARL OE CLARENDON. 
3 
sportsman is invariably a close observer of nature. To all students 
of natural history the name of Lord Walsingham is familiar, and I 
speak from personal knowledge when I say that amongst sportsmen 
he is facile princeps, and although hecatombs of the birds and the 
beasts of the field are yearly sacrificed to his unerring tubes, yet 
there does not exist any one who is a closer observer of their habits, 
who has written with greater or more practical knowledge concerning 
them, or who has himself made more interesting and valuable 
collections of the British Fauna. 
It has been said that almost all sports and pastimes are either 
cruel, dirty, or dangerous. However this may be, and it cannot be 
denied that there is a substratum of truth in the remark, there are 
two sides to the picture, and it is my province to look to-night to 
that side which presents itself in the fairer and brighter light, and 
to attempt to show that it is not a murderous instinct nor a love of 
slaughter which actuates those who take part in the sports of the 
field, the pursuit of which has tended in no inconsiderable degree 
to make Englishmen manly, brave, and self-reliant. Can it be 
supposed for one moment that the breathing living representation 
of the “Monarch of the Glen” or of the “Children of the Mist” 
could have been limned by one who had taken no part in compassing 
their downfall and death? Is it not rather that the accurate know¬ 
ledge of detail and the faithful portraiture of nature, which in Sir 
Edwin Landseer’s case gladdens the eye and thrills the heart of the 
deer-stalker, is the outcome of a personal participation in a pursuit 
the many incidents of which his brush has immortalized? Could 
that high priest of Diana, the king of sporting novelists, Whyte - 
Melville, have ever narrated those “ moving incidents by flood and 
field ” which warm the life-blood and stir the pulse of every fox- 
hunter, were it not that he loved the sport so well concerning which 
he wrote with such fire and vigour, and in the midst of which he 
met with his untimely end ? Is it not the case that many an 
English fireside is brightened by the perusal of the masterly efforts 
of the great novelist’s pen, many a British home rendered happier 
and cheerier by the contemplation of the faithful records of the great 
painter’s art? Who is there who is not edified by and interested 
in Charles Dickens’ description, in the immortal ‘Pickwick,’ of the 
1st of September, and of how the young partridge, ignorant of his 
fate, struts about the fields in the finnicking coxcombry of youth ; 
and who that would not believe that the spirit which characterizes 
his narrative is the result of personal observation and participation ? 
