To be candid with you, gentlemen! (I address myself to the sporting world) there is no character I hold in greater abhorrence than your's. From Nimrod down to Mr. Osbaldistone, I regard the whole hunting, angling, coursing, and shooting family (to use the civilest language I can command) as monsters in human form. Whether they throw the line, or pull the trigger, whether they persecute partridge, slay salmon, or prove their prowess and chivalry on magnanimous hares and mighty foxes, they equally excite my choler and my contempt; and (though there is nothing I so much dislike as Billingsgate phraseology) I denounce them, without scruple, as a pack of dull, dastardly, sanguinary, brutal, and ferocious miscreants. Aye! miscreants; I say miscreants. Why should the Czar Nicholas monopolize that appellation? I take leave to apply it to the gentlemen in scarlet jackets and top-boots, ycleped sportsmen-the agitators of the woods, the disturbers of the peace of hill and valley, Marats to the birds of the air, Dantons to the beasts of the field, and Robespierres to the inhabitants of the lakes, ponds, and rivers. A sportsman is so called because he

makes a sport of the sufferings of the brute creation. The pleasures of the chase consist in the torture of certain varieties, zoological, ornithological, and icthyological, of the animal kingdom. It is truly marvellous that entomology has not as yet been put under contribution for the pastime of our squires and country-gentlemen. Domitian is the only sportsman on record who seems to have looked on the insect world in the light of game. We have heard a vast deal of the cruelty of that emperor's favourite amusement of flykilling. What a monster to hunt down a father-long-legs; what prodigious atrocity to worry the life out of a blue-bottled-fly! Now for the life of me, I can discover no greater humanity in chasing and butchering birds and beasts than in tearing and destroying a moth or a grass-hopper; nor can I see any right whatever that our fox-hunters and grouse-killers have to arraign the Roman autocrat of barbarity. What! is the whole brute creation, quadruped and piped, furred and feathered, to be put beyond the pale of our tender mercies; and are we to have no bowels save for beetles and butterflies?

any given animal occupies in this simple arrangement, whether its rights are to be respected, or whether it is to be tormented and slaughtered with all the mental ingenuity and bodily energy that can be brought to bear upon a

pursuit at once so gentle, so enlightened, and so noble. The moment an unfortunate beast or bird is pronounced consecrated to game, it becomes cruelty-the word heretic was not more fatal in the days of Bonner, or puritan in the time of Laud-the mark of Cain, as it were, is stamped upon it; and any man who writes himself esquire, with a gun in his hand, and a license in his pocket, may torture, mutilate, and destroy it with impunity. With impunity do I say? Nay, the keener his taste for the butcherly occupation, the greater his renown: he grows in fame with every new murder; every hunted hare adds a laurel to his brow; every wounded woodcock claps a feather in his cap; every trout that writhes in mute an

guish at his feet, contributes to his ruffian celebrity.

In vain his silver plumage pleads for the devoted pheasant-in vain the proverbial timorousness of the hare, stigmatises, with the basest cowardice, the villain who meditates her persecution and ruin-in vain the partridge petitions, as she rises on "whirring wing," with her tender progeny about her, to be suffered to glean the October stubbles unmolested-all in vain the salmon speculates on a good old age, in the chrystal palaces of his finny forefathers-inexorable and ruthless is the sportsman's heart-hard his bosom as the nether mill-stone-not even the tear of the spent stag moves him, when

But this is digression. I was observing upon how slender a thread hangs the peace and welfare of three-fourths of animated nature: an animal is pronounced game, and forthwith better had it been for it that it had never broken the shell or issued from its mother's womb. The standard of game is undetermined. It depends upon no zoological or anatomical principles; there is nothing in outward structure, or inward conformation, that makes the difference between what is game and what is not. The sportsman's caprice is law. Let it be game, says Osbaldistone, or some other Nimrod of reputation, and it is game. Let the rook dwell in the tree-tops in

Should sportsmen ever adopt the notions of their gallant neighbours, in the particular in question, then, indeed, will “his watch-towers in the skies," be of infinite moment to the lark of the British isles; and in that sad event we should counsel him rather to build his nest in some thunder cloud, than to return to his native meadows. As to pouring forth his

matin gratulations at poets' casements, that were a deplorable temerity; for, though the bard may be a-bed within, the fowler would be astir without; and, though the former is pitiful, (else were he no true son of song,) yet is the latter ruthless: pity dwells not with those who wear the shootingjacket, and train the pointer they would spare the lark for its music, as

little as the hare for its weakness, the stag for his majesty, or the trout for his golden coat, glancing in the summer sun. But nature, we are told, impels us to the field. Some men are born to hunt, as others to legislate or to rhyme. Does not the savage pursue the game of his native forests-does he not bend the bow, hurl the javelin, and lay the snare for each bird and beast that soars above his head, or scuds athwart his path? True, but the savage is not a sportsman. Sporting is one of the barbarities of polished life, which the wildest desart that ever Indian roamed, has no parallel amongst its rude usages. Hunting is the business of the savage, not his divertisement. The beasts of the field and fowls of the air are to him necessaries, not game. He kills to eat, not for a brutal pastime; and he kills the readiest and quickest way. Hunger stimulates him, not sport; he hunts that he may dine, not merely to acquire an appetite for dinner. Compare him in this respect with the top-booted squire, and which is the barbarian? To obey the fundamental canon of nature, and when we hunger to put forth our hands and use the various viands that Providence has spread before us on the great table of the world, this is not

barbarism either in Britain or Otaheite; but to hunt, harrass, worry, tear, lacerate, and mangle the innoffensive and unresisting tenants of the woods or waters, which were subjected to our rational dominion, not to our brutal tyranny, this is atrocity without justification; the vocabulary of invective does not supply us with language adequate to express our abhorrence of enormity so black and so revolting. We must cease to be men before we can become fox-hunters. The ancients intended, no doubt, in the story of Acteon, to shadow forth the crime, and the just punishment of those pests of the animal creation called sportsmen; and what particularly disposes me to this opinion is the circumstance of Baotia (the land of blockheads) being assigned as the country of his birth. It is evident from this, that Actæon was designed to be a type of huntsmen in all future ages. Alas! that the fate of the ancestor has not always descended to his posterity with his genius! I never saw a band of these heroes of the hound and horn issuing forth at day-break, with all "the pomp and circumstance" of sylvan warfare, breathing destruction to foxes, or meditating the circumvention and slaughter of a poor hare, but I recollected the description of Ovid:

What! have we not legs to carry us, horses to mount, carriages to draw us? Can we not walk, ride, leap, swim, dance, play at bowls, cricket, ball, leapfrog, and a hundred other athletic games, to exercise our limbs, elevate our spirits, and string our sinews? Have we not Monsieur Huguenin to

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of gymnastics? Is it necessary to put our fellow-creatures to torture, either for our health or our amusement? Can we not be active and muscular, unless hares are worried? Can we not be cheerful and merry, unless the fox is torn to pieces first? Must we needs be melancholy, moping, pusillanimous beings, as long as

the stag is roused from his lair by the morning breezes instead of the "heavy bay" of the " deep-mouthed bloodhound?" To hearken to some people, one would suppose that the huntsman is the most important character in the nation. The dog-kennel is the only school. We should, beyond controversy, become a province of France, or a dependency of Belgium, within a twelvemonth after the disuse of our scarlet frocks, and the disbanding of

The gods

our harriers and beagles. keep us! on what slight contingencies hang the greatness and glory of kingdoms? Let a hard winter depopulate the hares, or let there be a mortality amongs the foxes, and straightway the fortunes of a mighty nation wane, and the sun of the British empire "hastens to its setting." Her consequence is the creature of the chace. We cease to be sportsmen and to be a nation at the same point of time. Such is the

dignity of game. Some writers there be, who assign to the House of Commons the high office of supporting the grandeur of the realm: others there be who maintain our merchants to be the pillars of the public prosperity: a third class assert that the church is the atlas on whose broad shoulders rests the burthen of the commonwealth; but all are in the dark-all these opinions are alike erroneous: the true canyatides that sustain the fabric of the state, are neither our representatives, our merchants, or even our churchmen; but-let the light shine-let the great truth no longer be hid under a bushelour hares and foxes! Some nations have owed their eminence to their breed of horses, others to their elephants, others to their sheep and oxen; but England flourishes, be it known unto all the world, because of two little animals, scarce four feet long from the caudal to the nasal extremity! The country gentlemen, or squires, are the strength of England. Curran called them "her wooden walls :" now the fox and the hare make the country gentleman or squire what he is; ergo, by all the philosophy of the Stagirite, and all the rules of Murray, the fox and the hare are the strength of England. De Lolme wrote in ignorance of this vital truth; Bolingbroke seems not to have considered it; Burke knew it not; Junius overlooked it; but babes and sucklings will sometimes overshoot sages; and what the deepest writers on our social polity had as little idea of as of the institutions of the Georgium Sidus, you shall find made as clear as the sun at noon in any number you open of the Sporting Magazine. Take, for example, the Number of last February, which happens to lie at this moment on our table. At page 240 you find the following morçeau :

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The New Forest has been hunted by several illustrious sportsmen. Among them was the late Mr. Gilbert, whose huntsman was old Tom Seabright, father to Lord Fitzwilliam's present huntsman, who ranks so high in his calling. The great Mr. Cramp

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ton of the Manor-house, near Lyndhurst, also hunted it, as did also Mr. Warde, for several successive seasons. Mr. Warde was succeeded by Nicoll, a sportsman of great celebrity, whose quitting it in the prime of his days was a NATIONAL LOSS. Perhaps no hunting country in England can boast of the extraordinary degree of harmony and fellowship that has existed among the frequenters of this hunt for the last sixty years, and long may it continue to distinguish it. Death has put his hand upon many; the times have dismounted others; but let the example of such as remain operate upon the rising generation."

Again, in another page we read"On the decease of Mr. Chute, the Vine country was taken by Mr. Abraham Pole, who built kennels and stables at his seat near Basingstoke, but he only hunted it two seasons, when he returned to his hunting-box in Warwickshire, where (melancholy to relate) he has, for many years, been domiciled in the winter. Indeed it is due to him to say, that never having been master of hounds before, he merely took the management of the Vine pack until a successor to Mr. Chute could be procured. Fortunately for the country, it was found in the person of Mr. Henry Fellowes, who is at this time at their head. Mr. Fellowes is no professor of science, but in every other respect, well qualified for a master."

This, to use a favourite newspaper phrase, needs no comment.

But these opinions are plebeian in the last degree. Old Isaac calls the angler's a "gentle craft ;" and protesting against the pleasures of the chase, we run no small risk of being taken for readers of the " Twopenny Trash," and disciples of Henry Hunt, blacking merchant and ex-M.P. But let calumny say her worst: we deny the title of the sportsman to the name of gentleman. Cruelty and treachery go not to form our idea of that character. What says Horace on this point :

That is to say, to leap five-bar gates, and be in at the death, are no gentlemanlike accomplishments.

Now ye Osbaldistones, and all ye sons of Nimrod, I have had a shot at you; and I have eased