Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 126.djvu/352

340 and Tobit's dog — would, I think, be a very incomplete and unpleasant paradise indeed!

It has often been said that the passion of Englishmen for field-sports is really due to this love of nature and of animals; that, like sheep-dogs (who, if they are not trained to guard sheep, will by an irresistible impulse follow and harry them), they feel compelled to have something to do with hares, and foxes, and partridges, and grouse, and salmon, and find that the only thing to be done is to course, and hunt, and shoot, and angle for them. Into this mystery I cannot dive. The propensity which can make a kind-hearted and merciful man (as most sportsmen are) not merely endure, but actually take pleasure in, killing innocent living things, and changing what is so beautiful in life and joy, into what is so ineffably sad and piteous wounded and dying, remains always to me utterly incomprehensible. But it is simply a fact that boys trained from boyhood to take pleasure in such "sports," and having, I doubt not, an "hereditary set of the brain" towards them, like so many greyhounds or pointers, never feel the ribrezzo or the remorse of the bird or beast murderer, but escaping all reflection, triumph in their own skill, and at the same time enjoy the woods, and fields, and river-sides where their quarry leads them. To do them justice, as against many efforts lately made to confound them with torturers of a very different class, they know very little what pain they inflict, and they endeavour eagerly to make that pain as brief as possible. Nevertheless, sport is as inexplicable a passion to the non-sporting mind to contemplate as for a deaf man to watch people dancing, bobbing up and down to music he does not hear.

A larger source of wonder is it to reflect that this same unaccountable passion for killing pheasants and pursuins: foxes has so deep a root in English life, that its arrest and disappointment by such a change of the game-laws as would lead to the abolition of game, would practically revolutionize all our manners. The attraction of the towns already preponderates over that of the country; but, as yet, the grouse have had the honour of proroguing annually the British Senate, and the partridges, the pheasants, the woodcocks, and the foxes, induce pretty nearly every man who can afford to shoot or hunt them, to bring his family to the country during the season wherein they are to be pursued. Of course women, left to themselves, would mostly choose to spend their winters in town, and their summers, from May till November, in the country. But the sport determines the session of Parliament, and the session determines the season; and as women love the London season quite as much as men like fox-hunting, both parties are equally bound to the same unfortunate division of time, and year after year passes, and the lilacs, and laburnums, and hawthorns, and limes in the old country homes waste their loveliness and their sweetness unseen, and the little children pine in Belgravian and South Kensington mansions, when they ought to be romping among their father's hay-fields, and galloping their ponies about his park. All these arrangements, and further, the vast establishments of horses and hounds, the enormous expenditure on guns, and gamekeepers and beaters, and game-preserving — the sole business of thousands of working-men, and the principal occupation and interest of half the gentlemen in the country — would be swept away by a stroke.

By some such change as this, or, more probably, by the pressure of a hundred sources of change, it is probable, nay, it is certain, that the old form of country life (which I have been describing, perhaps, rather as it was a few years ago than as it is now), will pass away and become a thing of memory. When that time arrives, I cannot but think that England and the world will lose a phase of human existence which, with all its lights and shadows, has been, perhaps, the most beautiful and perfect yet realized on earth. Certainly it has offered to many a happiness, pure, stable, noble, and blameless, such as it will be hard to parallel in any of the novel types of high-pressure modern life.

And, on the other hand, there is nothing so mournful as the life of an old ancestral home in the country! Everything reminds us of the lost, the dead who once called these stately chambers their habitations, whose voices once echoed through the halls, and for whose familiar tread we seem yet to wait; whose entrance, as of yore, through one of the lofty doors would scarcely surprise us; whom we almost expect, when we return after long absence, to see rising from their accustomed seats with open arms to embrace us, as in the days gone by. The trees they planted, the walks and flower-beds they designed; the sword 