sion extended to every living creature, to every thing that
could feel. Without alluding to his well-known fondness for dogs, and
for the animals of every kind he liked to have about him, and of which
he took the greatest care, it will be sufficient to point out the motive
which led him to deprive himself of the pleasures of the chase,--a
pastime that would have been, from his keen enjoyment of bodily
exercises, so congenial to his tastes. The reason is found in his
memorandum for 1814:--

"The last bird I ever fired at was an eaglet, on the shore of the Gulf
of Lepanto, near Vostitza. It was only wounded, and I tried to save it,
the eye was so bright: but it pined and died in a few days; and I never
did since, and never will, attempt the death of another bird."

Angling, as well as shooting, he considered cruel.

"And angling, too, that solitary vice,
Whatever Izaak Walton sings or says:
The quaint, old, cruel coxcomb, in his gullet
Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it."

And, as if he feared not to have expressed strongly enough his aversion
for the cruelties of angling, he adds in a note:--

"It would have taught him humanity at least. This sentimental savage,
whom it is a mode to quote (among the novelists) to show their sympathy
for innocent sports and old songs, teaches how to sew up frogs, and
break their legs by way of experiment, in addition to the art of
angling,--the cruelest, the coldest, and the stupidest of pretended
sports. They may talk about the beauties of nature, but the angler
merely thinks of his dish of fish; he has no leisure to take his eyes
from off the streams, and a single bite is worth to him more than all
the scenery around. Besides, some fish bite best on a rainy day. The
whale, the shark, and the tunny fishery have somewhat of noble and
perilous in them; even net-fishing, trawling, etc., are more humane and
useful. But angling!--no angler can be a good man."

"One of the best men I ever knew (as humane, delicate-minded, generous,
and excellent a creature as any in the world) was an angler; true, he
angled with painted flies, and would have been incapable of the
extravagances of Izaak Walton."

"The above addition was made by a friend, in reading over the
MS.:--'_Audi alteram partem_'--I leave it to counterbalance my own
observations."

It is well known that Lord Byron would not deride certain superstitions,
and was sometimes tempted to exclaim with Hamlet,--