ness of pistols in preference to snuffers, and of the vast utility of splitting bullets against the edges of knives. We must not, however, pass over unnoticed the case of William Tell, if it be only on account of Rossini's music or Macready's acting; and at the same time to express our own wonder that this accomplished toxophilite should have reserved his second arrow for the heart of the tyrant. He must have been devilishly vain of his talent for hitting a mark!

But now it is that we come to the very pith and marrow of the subject, and arrive at the morality of shooting; a consideration which naturally divides itself (as the sermon writers are wont to say) under three heads, war-duelling-and the destruction of game;-" and first of the first "

The morality of war rests on this most plain and demonstrative fact (if upon no other), that whenever a great battle has been lost or won, and some hundred thousands of human beings have been tortured and slain, or whenever a town has been taken by storm, and murder, lust, and rapine, have done their worst by the unoffending inhabitants, the most christian of kings have not failed to sing Te Deums on the occasion; and the people also have poured forth their thanksgivings to "the God of battles," whose sanction and approval of such doings are implicitly contained in his precept "to love one another," and his divine mission of " peace on earth, and goodwill towards man." There are, I own, casuists who, in their fanatical love of peace, maintain that shooting soldiers and sailors is bad for trade, and, therefore, exquisitely immoral; but to these I reply triumphantly, by pointing to the revolutionary war, in which we had a monopoly of the world's commerce, and raised the manufacture of cotton nightcaps from hundreds to millions. With respect to the morality of duelling, I am almost ashamed to trespass on the reader's patience. Every child knows that if there were no duelling, there would be no walking the streets in safety, that everybody would insist on taking the wall, that every man would be called a liar, and every woman insulted in a much more serious and unbearable manner. The fact is notorious, that so quarrelsome, illmannered, and brutal is the constitution of man, and more especially of the gentry of Europe, so savage their temperament, and irreligious their disposition, that if it were not for Sir Lucius O'Trigger as a dancingmaster, the bonds of society would be broken up, our dinner-tables and drawing-rooms would become one continued scene of violence and rage, and "darkness be the burier of the dead."

Lastly, touching the morality of shooting for sport, I am not one of those straw-splitting philosophers who see much difference between killing sheep or partridges, oxen or pheasants for the table; nor can I believe it makes" much odds" whether we do the office for ourselves, or sanction its being performed by others. If the use of animal food be permitted us (and that it is so, is revealed in the structure of our stomachs and teeth), it seems absurd to tax the practice of sporting as cruel or criminal, because animal life is taken in its enjoyment; nor does it appear in practice that the Daddy Hawthorns are generally less kind-hearted or moral, than others who do not find delight in the amusement of shooting. On the contrary, the healthfulness of the sport, the bracing effects of good air and exercise, are in themselves causes

for a more cheerful and therefore for a more moral constitution of the mind; not to say anything of the sportsman's removal from the busy cares, the avarice, the ambition, and the jealous rivalry of a city life.

Admitting these premises, however, it must still be confessed that the practice of shooting does imply some slight degree of insensibility to the sufferings of sentient beings. Sportsmen in general" cast from them. with indignation" (as the political spouters express themselves after dinner) the imputation of pandering for their own stomachs, and "yield to no man" in their contempt for the gratifications of masticating and imbibing the flesh of game. It is not the end, then, but the means, that prove attractive; but the pleasure of destruction, I admit, is not very sentimental; and the love of shooting must be set down as an animal appetite. But what then? are not our animal appetites an essential part of our physiological complex? are they not a part of the great scheme of Providence? and if they be not quite as elevated, as ennobling, as heaven-seeking propensities, as pride, ambition, and the love of reading one's own name in the newspaper, they are not to be cried down and trampled under foot, as if they were the creation of Satan. "Of all the cants, &c. &c." I abominate this cant of running down our animal indulgencies. Show me the highest flier among the sentimentalists whose temper would withstand the loss of his dinner, nay, its simple procrastination ;-(by which I do not mean etymologically the putting it off till to-morrow, but a trifling adjournment for some half an hour or so)-show me the idealist who would not resent a troppo meno or troppo piu in the boiling of his turbot; nay, of so small a matter as his potato. Why the very hermit who lives upon roots and water, does so by way of penance; and his belief that such mortification is acceptable, includes no trifling estimate of the pleasures he abandons. No, no, my dear Sirs, these same animal pleasures answer a very necessary purpose in the economy, and were made to possess a high relish, in order to insure its accomplishment. As much poetry, then, and music as you please, as much sublime and beautiful, as much ideality and Werterism; but no disparagement to cakes and ale, in Heaven's name; and "Oh! don't forget the toasted cheese.'

دو

Moralists of a somewhat sickly complexion are apt to insist upon the gratuitous pain inflicted by sportsmen in shooting at animals whose dead carcases are not of any use to the party when he has hit them. By a strange perversion of logic, too, converting the sportsman's misfortune into a fault, they will also upbraid him with the sufferings of the animals which he may have only wounded, and left to perish in the woods. But exclusively of such things being an inevitable contingency, and not a designed ill, let me ask if the winging a bird be worse than hurrying a mantuamaker's 'prentice into a consumption, in order to have a new gown in time for an impromptu ball, or for an unexpected court drawingroom? Is the laming a hare worse than the ulcerating a needle pointer's lungs with the sharp fragments of steel abraded by the wheel? What are the few partridge that annually thus suffer, to the painters paralyzed with white lead, or the asthmatic millers poisoned by their own dust? to say nothing of the factory children murdered by overwork, the young women who perish the victims of man's gentler pleasures, the people blown up, or the people cast down, in making fireworks, or ballooning,

for the gratification of the London gobemouches. The fact is, that there are few, if any, of our amusements which are not attended by the suffering and premature decay of those who administer to them; and scarcely a comfort or a luxury which is wholly unstained with human blood. But we tell our friends the Tartuffes of morality that these things must not be looked at thus, for there would be no enduring it.

To place the morality of shooting in a still clearer evidence, and to put the seal to our argument, I shall just recal to the reader's recollection, that aphorism of constitutional wisdom which defends the game-laws upon the specific ground of upholding the race of country gentlemen. If, say these reasoners, if the landed aristocracy were not permitted to shoot, they would never stay in the country to dun their tenants, give the curates their Sunday dinners, and set refractory bumpkins in the stocks. What a furious libel would this be upon the parties in question, if shooting were, I will not say merely an harmless amusement, but, much more, a virtue of no ordinary brilliancy and utility. On this point. the conclusion is stringent. English country gentlemen are the perfection of wisdom and of virtue: but all country gentlemen shoot; shooting therefore is not incompatible with the perfection of wisdom and virtue.

There is, however, one other department of shooting which must not be passed over;-I mean the case in which a desperate spendthrift or gambler, after having wasted his substance, broken the hearts of a wife and children, and consigned his too confiding creditors to a prison, administers a spontaneous and summary justice, by shooting-himself. The morality of this practice is the more remarkable, for that it is generally speaking the one solitary good deed that the party has ever perpetrated. The pity of it is that so unexceptionable an act was not the first, instead of the last, in the series of his mischievous existence.

As far as concerns the æsthetics of shooting, I may not possibly be the very best of judges, inasmuch as I have never tried them, in my own proper person. I am thus liable, it is certain, to estimate the gratifications which shooting affords at a higher or lower rate than they deserve; but still if those who look on, see the most of a game, and if moralists in general make much better estimates in their neighbours' affairs than in their own, I shall not despair of approaching the truth; at all events, I will candidly set down my guesses on the subject, leaving it to the initiated to preserve their own opinions, should they unaccountably differ from mine.

In the first place, then, as I have already hinted, it seems to me that in all sorts of shooting, the main pleasure is the killing. How else is it that sportsmen ever count their victims, and estimate the day's sport by the numbers they have bagged? If this were not so, why would a battu through preserves, where the game stay to be shot at, as tame as barn-door fowls, be preferred to common shooting, in which the excitement of some slight uncertainty adds its zest to the amusement? In this view of the subject I am much strengthened by a practice I have observed to prevail among bad shots, who, not being able to answer the cravings of their appetite for destruction, by bringing down a quantum sufficit of birds, instead of scratching behind their ears, (where lies the organ of destructiveness,) to allay the irritation, very quietly let fly, bang, at the nearest brother sportsman.

Now do not be shocked, my young friends, at this somewhat cynical revelation of a great truth. Remember that, if we cannot, by taking thought, add a cubit to our physical stature, neither can we, by giving ourselves unfounded airs, and setting philosophy on stilts, eke out our imperfect and grovelling moral nature: we are but what we are, take the matter as we may. The phrenologists, who could not have philosophised so foolishly as to argue from the bump to its faculty, declare that we have a pleasure in destruction, whether it be the bayonetting of a flying enemy, the breaking of moveables, the simple tearing of paper, or even the ideal destruction doled out in a round of good hearty cursing and swearing. As far as the two last go, I must own, col mio rossore, that I have tried both; and I cannot conceal how great was the gratification experienced in reducing to minute fragments a tailor's dunning epistle, and, with clenched teeth and stamping feet, consigning his members and appurtenances to ; but that was in early days, when the blood was hot, and the discretion uncultivated.

A strong analogy presents itself in the case of duellists, with whom the word "satisfaction" has become technical. Whatever may be said to the contrary, no one really believes that, in seeking satisfaction, a man contemplates the pleasure of receiving a thrust through the lungs with a small sword, or a bullet in his pericranium. No man looks forward to the satisfaction of being carried home on a shutter, or having a surgeon dabble for half an hour in his interior, in search of some drachms of lead, and a couple of inches of stray broad-cloth. The satisfaction, therefore, must lie in the active and not the passive portion of this transaction. If it be objected that when the job is done, the shooter very commonly expresses much regret to the shootee, wishes to exchange situations with him, and prays heartily for his speedy recovery, I answer, first, that such is the established rule of procedure in the like cases, and that a man of honour cannot do less than say as much; and, secondly, that there may at the moment come over the shooter some rather positive notions of an arrest, an imprisonment, and the lottery of twelve men's opinions on the entire business.

That man has a positive pleasure in the destruction of war, is an admitted fact. In war, if under any circumstances, you catch human nature in the fact, stripped of all the disguises which civilization with its thousand affectations throws round it-in war, there is no fear of the gallows, no dread even of the qu'en dira-t-on of the bystander: but what exultation follows the bomb that blows up a magazine, or the springing of a mine that launches whole battalions into eternity! Not only is the opposing enemy killed without mercy, but the unlucky native, who has nothing to do with the combatants; and so rife is the impulse to destroy, that, in the plunder of a town, what cannot be carried away is broken to pieces, for the mere pleasure of doing gratuitous mischief.

On all these grounds, then, we may safely infer that the sportsman has no objection to a little blood; and as some one used to take off his hat to coach-horses, for doing that which the great (without their intervention) would impose on the little, so I am half inclined to do the like by the hares and partridges, for the diversion they afford to an organ, which might otherwise seek its indulgences at my own cost. The de

structive tendency is indeed rather openly manifested in the determined opposition which the entire sporting world has afforded against all alleviations of the severity of the game laws. To little purpose have the pseudo-philanthropists pointed out the demoralising influence of that code, the lives it has cost, the insecurity it has inflicted on property, and the employment it has given to the gallows. To all these considerations there was but one answer-the game must be preserved and the mantrap and spring-gun that guard the preserves are scarcely less inaccessible to pity than the legislators who allow them.

Another pleasure derivable from shooting lies in gratified vanity. To this pleasure we may attribute the invention of pigeon matches, in which there is neither the cheerful exercise, the enjoyments of nature, nor the excitement of the chace. The sole object which is sought, is the ascertainment that one man is a better shot than another; for, as to the gambling part of the transaction, that is extrinsic-an abuse that has grown out of the practice, and which has been quartered on a vast many other amusements, in themselves perfectly innocent. But the shooter of whom vanity is most justly predicable, is the gentle Toxophilite, who is called into the field by the charms of a picturesque dress, the display of a good figure, and the hopes of the silver arrow which is to signalise superiority. These gratifications are much enhanced by the intermixture of the sexes; and though I by no means would be understood as denying the attraction of the luncheon, which accompanies the target to the field, yet I must not pass over the amatory speculations which may be engrafted on the sport, nor deny my belief that the beaux go for as much as the bows, that the arrows shotten are not all aimed at the target, nor all the triumphs rigorously circumscribed within the bull's eye.

Let me not be reviled as striving to lower the character of the sportsman, if I state my belief that some portion of his pleasures are derived from the noise. This is a rooted conviction of mine, and on that account I have ever esteemed cocking the most exciting department of the sport. The animal pleasures of noise are declared in the unsophisticated habits of children, savages, and the frequenters of public dinners. All public rejoicings, too, are accompanied by noises; and the chiming of the parish bells and the booming of the great guns bear obtrusive evidence of the universality of the maxim. The only exception that occurs to me at this moment, is in the case of smokers, who generally have more of the Pythagorean about them than others. But concerning smokers, as the Jesuits say, distinguo. It is not the abstract love of silence that disposes them to abstain, yea, even from good words;" but the physical impossibility of using the mouth for both purposes at once: and this, too, may be the reason why the ladies so rarely indulge in tobacco, as imposing an undesirable restraint on their undoubted privilege of declaring their sentiments at all times, upon all things, and all persons. The sportsman, therefore, need not be ashamed of deriving a pleasure from the explosion of his piece. Even the Lords and Commons of Great Britain-the two most dignified assemblies in the world-delight in the echoes of their own voices; and, upon occasion, can be as boisterous and as noisy as any other congregation of less exclusive pretensions. On this account I cannot enter into the feelings of those musical critics, who

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