others of like tenets now and then, his precepts
and example had not crushed a sportsman, but
had cultivated a hypocrite.

Shopkeepers, brokers of stock and of
produce, lawyers, civil engineers, bankers and their
clerks, supply a large proportion of the fishing
men, the shooting men, and the hunting men.
The navvy grown into a contractor (no
uncommon metamorphose a few years ago), the
potboy converted into a wine-merchant and
landowner, the mechanic who has built up a
fortune as well as a factory, the gardener and
the fishmonger, the artist and architect, who—
from small beginnings and humble origin have
risen to be great and famous—all hold shares
in the great joint-stock company for cultivating
health, exercise, and mental rest, sociality,
geniality, hospitality, and other virtues difficult
to cultivate in this hard-working, class-divided
world of England.

The peculiar school of money-making philosophers
who look upon squires, pheasants, and
foxes as all alike—vermin—and destined to be
extinguished by the march of agricultural improvement,
would be rather puzzled if any chance
should lead them to join an agricultural-minded
public dinner, by the manner in which the toast
of "Fox-hunting" wakes up to light and life
those down-trodden vassals, the tenant farmers,
whom, in their poetical eloquence, they often
picture as mourning in their melancholy homesteads,
crops destroyed and fences smashed by
the red-coated invaders, and poultry decimated
by the useless vermin of the chase; it would be
amazing to them how the glad tally-hos, triuimphant
who-whoops, and " one cheer more," come
from the very hearts of the farmers; and when
the Master of Fox Hounds, who has been sitting
very  quiet, gets up and says not fluently—for he
seldom is fluent except when on horseback—
that " he wishes to show sport, but cannot do so
without the farmers to back him as they have
done, and he hopes they will still," an overflowing
simultaneous burst of applause from the
brow-red faces drowns the conclusion of the
sentence, and enables the M.F.H. to resume his
seat. And if our politico-philosophical philanthropist
should, by any force less than that of
cart-horses and cart-ropes—say in search of a
profitable investment—be drawn into a truly
rural district to some comfortable four or five
hundred acre farm just after harvest, he would
learn what genuine hospitality is; and then, in
the fox-hunting season, he might note young
farmers riding " like mad" in front, and old ones
inviting friends and strangers to trot round and
take a glass of ale. In fact, he would find that
there is not a well-farmed district in England
in which fair sport is not popular with the real
farmers.

But there is another kind of sport, a bastard
selfish sport, if sport it can be called, which has
been so well dissected and injected and presented
in all its hideous deformity, in a pamphlet,* that
we cannot do better than take our examples
from the anatomical museum of the author—
descendant of a long generation of sportsmen.

* The Over-Preservation of Game: a Paper read
before the Central Farmers' Club. By Henry Corbet,
the Secretary. March 5, 1860.

A battue is a contrivance for killing the largest
quantity of game in the smallest time, with the
least amount of trouble, by a small select party.
It is next door to firing at wild German swine
while taking their daily meal of corn, as some
German princes do, or shooting into a poultry-yard
at feeding time.

The sportsman fond of shooting, expects to walk
hard and work hard to fill his bag, as the phrase
goes; although, by the way, game in this country
is seldom bagged, if it can be helped, but carried
daintily by an attendant, in a sort of portable
pillory. The peculiar charm of a battue appears
to lie, first, in its enormous cost, which places it
out of the reach of men of moderate means;
next, in the arrangements for wholesale slaughter
by people who, being neither good shots nor
good walkers, are unable to take advantage of
the working of  well-trained dogs.

For a battue, it is essential to concentrate an
enormous head of game in a confined space.
Thus, after birds have been bred on the plan of
a well-managed poultry-yard, hatched under
hens, and fed regularly on chosen spots, they
are driven, if partridges, into selected turnip
fields, and if pheasants, into coverts, where certain
rides or paths have been stopped up with
netting, so that the tame birds may not run out
of danger.

The landowner or game-renter who determines
to indulge in the ostentatious luxury of a battue,
begins by engaging a large army of keepers,
who are practically, if not legally, invested with
an authority that can only be compared in its
exercise to the functions and privileges of the
police and spies of certain continental states.
It is the gamekeeper's business to repress
poachers; to encourage the breeding of every
kind of game, feathered and four footed, on
every acre of land under his master's control;
and to destroy everything he chooses to call
vermin. Rabbits- the especial enemy of the
farmer, being the head gamekeeper's peculiar
perquisite are specially protected and multiplied.
A gamekeeper has been known to net
three hundred pounds a year by rabbits alone.
Hares are the next objects of his care, for they
are safe and favourite battue marks, and he does
not do his duty unless they are at least as
plentiful as sheep on turnips within a mile circle
of the principal battue coverts.

Then, in the breeding season, it is his business
to find out every outlying pheasant, and every
partridge's nest, and have it watched, as a
"political suspect" is watched by a French
mouchard. The farmer (that is, the tenant-at-will
farmer) and his men, are continually under the
ever-watchful and malicious eye of the keeper and
his understrappers, who are promoted poachers,
or lazy  labourers. "There is nothing," says
Mr. Corbet, "they can do but it is 'his duty'
to overlook them. He stands by the mowers to
see they do no harm to ' his nests.' He struts
into the reaping field to make sure they don't