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r his dogs, deer and other animals from his AEsop's fable-like groups to his four duplicated lions in Trafalgar Square, belong--heretic that we are to say it!--properly to still life, their want of action and _verve_ placing them beneath comparison with the works of either one of a score of Flemish and French painters, from Rubens and Snyders down to Bonheur and Vernet. That his unsold pictures have brought, since his death, something like half a million proves nothing. Time was when the worthless canvases of West and Morland were equally transmutable into gold. Like other forms of British field-sports, deer-stalking is sufficiently intricate and artificial. It is obviously the occupation of men whose primary object is more to kill time than to kill deer. According to print, from type and plate, the stag, a reduced edition of the American wapiti, is, in the heart of a little kingdom of some hundreds of souls to the square mile, as little accustomed to the sight of man and as hard to approach as he would be on the head-waters of the Yellowstone. If five or six hours' worming, _ventre a terre_, up the bed of a mountain-torrent, with not even a rowan-bush to aid concealment, succeed in bringing the sports-man within two hundred yards of his unconscious game, it is a good day's performance. How, the dun deer's hide once perforated, the "tail" of game-keepers, beaters and volunteer hangers-on is gathered up, the comforting toothfu' of usquebaugh absorbed by the toilers of the brae, the victim "gralloched" and suspended across the inevitable gray Highland pony that makes such a capital "first light" for the foreground, and the line of triumphant march taken up for hunting-box, clachan or castle, have we not been told to repletion? The tool used on these occasions is up to the latest requirements of modern science. Whitworth and Lancaster, thanks to their projectile's being wedged in so tight as to cause an occasional misunderstanding it and the breech-plug as to which was expected to move, have grown unpopular. The style and the patentee vary every year or two or oftener, breech-loading and the elongated bullet being the only persistent features. Among the commonalty of Britain, within a very few years past, rifle-clubs and matches have been brought greatly into vogue under government encouragement. Austria, _tu infelix_ this time, having served unwillingly as an experimental target, with the most distinguished and gratif
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