410

OUR PARISH, 422

PREFATORY NOTE.

Like most of Professor Wilson's miscellaneous writings, the articles
contained in the two following volumes appeared originally in
"Blackwood's Magazine." Having been revised and considerably remodelled
by their Author, they were published in three volumes, 8vo, in 1842,
under the general title, "The Recreations of Christopher North." In the
reprint, the special titles of some of the articles are different from
those which the same papers bear in the Magazine.

RECREATIONS

OF

CHRISTOPHER NORTH.

CHRISTOPHER IN HIS SPORTING JACKET.

FYTTE FIRST.

There is a fine and beautiful alliance between all pastimes pursued on
flood, field, and fell. The principles in human nature on which they
depend, are in all the same; but those principles are subject to
infinite modifications and varieties, according to the difference of
individual and national character. All such pastimes, whether followed
merely as pastimes, or as professions, or as the immediate means of
sustaining life, require sense, sagacity, and knowledge of nature and
nature's laws; nor less, patience, perseverance, courage even, and
bodily strength or activity, while the spirit which animates and
supports them is a spirit of anxiety, doubt, fear, hope, joy,
exultation, and triumph--in the heart of the young a fierce passion--in
the heart of the old a passion still, but subdued and tamed down,
without, however, being much dulled or deadened, by various experience
of all the mysteries of the calling, and by the gradual subsiding of all
impetuous impulses in the frames of all mortal men beyond perhaps
three-score, when the blackest head will be becoming grey, the most
nervous knee less firmly knit, the most steely-springed instep less
elastic, the keenest eye less of a far-keeker, and, above all, the most
boiling heart less like a caldron or a crater--yea, the whole man
subject to some dimness or decay, and, consequently, the whole duty of
man like the new edition of a book, from which many passages that formed
the chief glory of the _editio princeps_ have been expunged--the whole
character of the style corrected without being thereby improved--just
like the later editions of the Pleasures of Imagination, which were
written by Akenside when he was about twenty-one, and altered by him at
forty--to the exclusion or destruction of many most _