's son, if he had a pony, or the butcher-boy
out of the town, could come and take his part; and if the butcher-boy
could go ahead and keep his place while the man with a red coat and
pink boots and with two horses fell behind, the butcher-boy would
have the best of it, and incur the displeasure of no one. And the
laws, too, by which hunting is governed, if there be laws, are
thoroughly democratic in their nature. They are not, he said, made by
any Parliament, but are simply assented to on behalf of the common
need. It was simply in compliance with opinion that the lands of all
men are open to be ridden over by the men of the hunt. In compliance
with opinion foxes are preserved. In compliance with opinion coverts
are drawn by this or the other pack of hounds. The Legislature had
not stepped in to defile the statute book by bye-laws made in favour
of the amusements of the rich. If injury were done, the ordinary laws
of the country were open to the injured party. Anything in hunting
that had grown to be beyond the reach of the law had become so by the
force of popular opinion.

All of this was reversed in shooting, from any participation in which
the poor were debarred by enactments made solely on behalf of the
rich. Four or five men in a couple of days would offer up hecatombs
of slaughtered animals, in doing which they could only justify
themselves by the fact that they were acting as poultry-butchers for
the supply of the markets of the country. There was no excitement
in it,--simply the firing off of many guns with a rapidity which
altogether prevents that competition which is essential to
the enjoyment of sport. Then our noble Republican would quote
Teufelsdroeckh and the memorable epitaph of the partridge-slayer. But
it was on the popular and unpopular elements of the two sports that
he would most strongly dilate, and on the iniquity of the game-laws
as applying to the more aristocratic of the two. It was, however,
asserted by the sporting world at large that Hampstead could not hit
a haystack.

As to fishing, he was almost equally violent, grounding his objection
on the tedium and cruelty incident to the pursuit. The first was only
a matter of taste, he would allow. If a man could content himself and
be happy with an average of one fish to every three days' fishing,
that was the man's affair. He could only think that in such case the
man himself must be as cold-blooded as the fish which he so seldom
succeeded in