The nineteenth century was, beyond all others, the century of big game hunters, and of books about big game. From the days of Nimrod to our own there have been mighty hunters before the Lord, and most warlike and masterful races have taken kindly to the chase, as chief among those rough pastimes which appeal naturally to men with plenty of red blood in their veins. But until the nineteenth century the difficulties of travel were so great that men of our race with a taste for sport could rarely gratify this taste except in their own neighborhood. The earlier among the great conquering kings of Egypt and Assyria, when they made their forays into Syria and the region of the Upper Euphrates, hunted the elephant and the wild bull, as well as the lions with which the country swarmed; and Tiglath-Pileser the First, as overlord of Phœnicia, embarked on the Mediterranean, and there killed a “sea-monster,” presumably a whale—a feat which has been paralleled by no sport-loving sovereign of modern times, save by that stout hunter, the German Kaiser; though I believe the present English King, like several members of his family, has slain both elephants and tigers before he came to the throne. But the elephant disappeared from Eastern Asia a thousand years before our era; and the lion had become rare or unknown in lands where the dwellers were of European stock, long before the days of written records.

There was good hunting in Macedonia in the days of Alexander the Great; there was good hunting in the Hercynian Forest when Frank and Bergund were turning Gaul into France; there was good hunting in Lithuania and Poland as late as the days of Sobiéski; but the most famous kings and nobles of Europe, within historic times, though they might kill the aurochs and the bison, the bear and the boar, had no chance to test their prowess against the mightier and more terrible beasts of the tropics.

No modern man could be more devoted to the chase than were the territorial lords of the Middle Ages. Two of the most famous books of the chase ever written were the Livre de Chasse of Count Gaston de Foix—Gaston Phœbus, well known to all readers of Froissart—and the translation or adaptation and continuation of the same, the “Master of Game,” by that Duke of York who “died victorious” at Agincourt. Mr. Baillie-Grohman, himself a hunter and mountaineer of wide experience, a trained writer and observer, and a close student of the hunting lore of the past, has edited and reproduced the “Master of Game,” in form which makes it a delight to every true lover of books no less than to every true lover of sport. A very interesting little book is Clamorgan’s Chasse du Loup, dedicated to Charles the Ninth of France; my copy is of the edition of 1566. The text and the illustrations are almost equally attractive.

As the centuries passed it became more and more difficult to obtain sport in the thickly settled parts of Europe save in the vast game preserves of the Kings and great lords. These magnates of Continental Europe, down to the beginning of the last century, followed the chase with all the ardor of Gaston Phœbus; indeed, they erred generally on the side of fantastic extravagance and exaggeration in their favorite pursuit, turning it into a solemn and rather ridiculous business instead of a healthy and vigorous pastime; but they could hunt only the beasts of their own forests. The men who went on long voyages usually had quite enough to do simply as travellers; the occupation of getting into unknown lands, and of keeping alive when once in them, was in itself sufficiently absorbing and hazardous to exclude any chance of combining with it the role of sportsman.

With the last century all this had changed. Even in the eighteenth century it began to change. The Dutch settlers at the Cape of Good Hope, and the English settlers on the Atlantic coast of North America, found themselves thrown back into a stage of life where hunting was one of the main means of livelihood, as well as the most exciting and adventurous of pastimes. These men knew the chase as men of their race had not known it since the days before history dawned; and until the closing decades of the last century the Americans and the Afrikanders of the frontier largely led the lives of professional hunters. Oom Paul and Buffalo Bill led very different careers after they reached middle age; but in their youth warfare against wild beasts and wild men was the most serious part of the life-work of both. They and their fellows did the rough pioneer work of civilization, under conditions which have now vanished for ever, and their type will perish with the passing of the forces that called it into being. But the big game hunter, whose campaigns against big game are not simply incidents in his career as a pioneer settler, will remain with us for some time longer; and it is of him and his writings that we wish to treat.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century this big game hunter had already appeared, although, like all early types, he was not yet thoroughly specialized. Le Vaillant hunted in South Africa, and his volumes are excellent reading now. A still better book is that of Bruce, the Abyssinian explorer, who was a kind of Burton of his days, with a marvellous faculty for getting into quarrels, but an even more marvellous faculty for doing work which no other man could do. He really opened a new world to European men of letters and science; who thereupon promptly united in disbelieving all he said, though they were credulous enough toward people who really should have been distrusted. But his tales have been proved true by many an explorer since then, and his book will always possess interest for big game hunters, because of his experiences in the chase. Sometimes he shot merely in self-defense or for food, but he also made regular hunting trips in company with the wild lords of the shifting frontier between dusky Christian and dusky infidel. He feasted in their cane palaces, where the walls were hung with the trophies of giant game, and in their company, with horse and spear, he attacked and overcame the buffalo and the rhinoceros.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century the hunting book proper became differentiated, as it were, from the book of the explorer. One of the earliest was Williamson’s “Oriental Field Sports.” This is to the present day a most satisfactory book, especially to sporting parents with large families of small children. The pictures are all in colors, and the foliage is so very green, and the tigers are so very red, and the boars so very black, and the tragedies so uncommonly vivid and startling, that for the youthful mind the book really has no formidable rival outside of the charmed circle where Slovenly Peter stands first.

Since then multitudes of books have been written about big game hunting. Most of them are bad, of course, just as most novels and most poems are bad; but some of them are very good indeed, while a few are entitled to rank high in literature—though it cannot be said that as yet big game hunters as a whole have produced such writers as those who dwell on the homelier and less grandiose side of nature. They have not produced a White or Burroughs, for instance. What could not Burroughs have done if only he had cared for adventure and for the rifle, and had roamed across the Great Plains and the Rockies, and through the dim forests, as he has wandered along the banks of the Hudson and the Potomac! Thoreau, it is true, did go to the Maine Woods; but then Thoreau was a transcendentalist and slightly anæmic. A man must feel the beat of hardy life in his veins before he can be a good big game hunter. Fortunately, Richard Jeffries has written an altogether charming little volume on the Red Deer, so that there is at least one game animal which has been fully described by a man of letters, who was also both a naturalist and a sportsman; but it is irritating to think that no one has done as much for the lordlier game of the wilderness. Not only should the hunter be able to describe vividly the chase, and the life habits of the quarry, but he should also draw the wilderness itself, and the life of those who dwell or sojourn therein. We wish to see before us the cautious stalk and the headlong gallop; the great beasts as they feed or rest or run or make love or fight; the wild hunting camps; the endless plains shimmering in the sunlight; the vast, solemn forests; the desert and the marsh and the mountain chain; and all that lies hidden in the lonely lands through which the wilderness wanderer roams and hunts game.

But there remain a goodly number of books which are not merely filled with truthful information of importance, but which are also absorbingly interesting; and if a book is both truthful and interesting it is surely entitled to a place somewhere in general literature. Unfortunately, the first requisite bars out a great many hunting-books. There are not a few mighty hunters who have left long records of their achievements, and who undoubtedly did achieve a great deal, but who contrive to leave in the mind of the reader the uncomfortable suspicion, that besides their prowess with the rifle they were skilled in the use of that more archaic weapon, the long bow. “The Old Shekarry,” who wrote of Indian and African sport, was one of these. Gerard was a great lion-killer, but some of his accounts of the lives, deaths, and especially the courtships, of lions, bear much less relation to actual facts than do the novels of Dumas. Not a few of the productions of hunters of this type should be grouped under the head-lines used by the newspapers of our native land in describing something which they are perfectly sure hasn’t happened—“Important, if True.” The exactly opposite type is presented in another Frenchman, M. Foa, a really great hunter who also knows how to observe and to put down what he has observed. His two books on big game hunting in Africa have permanent value.

If we were limited to the choice of one big game writer, who was merely such, and not in addition a scientific observer, we should have to choose Sir Samuel Baker, for his experiences are very wide, and we can accept without question all that he says in his books. He hunted in India, in Africa, and in North America; he killed all the chief kinds of heavy and dangerous game; and he followed them on foot and on horseback, with the rifle and the knife, and with hounds. For the same reason, if we could choose but one work, it would have to be the volumes of “Big Game Shooting,” in the Badminton Library, edited by Mr. Phillipps Wolley—himself a man who has written well of big game hunting in out-of-the-way places, from the Caucasus to the Cascades. These volumes contain pieces by many different authors; but they differ from most volumes of the kind in that all the writers are trustworthy and interesting; though the palm must be given to Oswell’s delightful account of his South African hunting. The book on the game beasts of Africa edited by Mr. Bryden is admirable in every way.

In all these books the one point to be insisted on is that a big game hunter has nothing in common with so many of the men who delight to call themselves sportsmen. Sir Samuel Baker has left a very amusing record of the horror he felt for the Ceylon sportsmen who, by the term “sport,” meant horse-racing instead of elephant shooting. Half a century ago, Gordon-Cumming wrote of “the life of the wild hunter, so far preferable to that of the mere sportsman”; and his justification for this somewhat sneering reference to the man who takes his sport in too artificial a manner, may be found in the pages of a then noted authority on such sports as horse-racing and fox-hunting; for in Apperly’s “Nimrod Abroad,” in the course of an article on the game of the American wilderness, there occurs this delicious sentence: “A damper, however, is thrown over all systems of deer-stalking in Canada by the necessity, which is said to be unavoidable, of bivouacking in the woods instead of in well-aired sheets!” Verily, there was a great gulf between the two men.

In the present century the world has known three great hunting-grounds: Africa, from the equator to the southernmost point; India, both farther and hither; and North America west of the Mississippi, from the Rio Grande to the Arctic Circle. The latter never approached either of the former in the wealth and variety of the species, or in the size and terror of the chief beasts of the chase; but it surpassed India in the countless numbers of the individual animals, and in the wild and unknown nature of the hunting-grounds, while the climate and surroundings made the conditions under which the hunter worked pleasanter and healthier than those in any other land.

South Africa was the true hunter’s paradise. If the happy hunting-grounds were to be found anywhere in this world, they lay between the Orange and the Zambesi, and extended northward here and there to the Nile countries and Somaliland. Nowhere else were there such multitudes of game, representing so many and such widely different kinds of animals, of such size, such beauty, such infinite variety. We should have to go back to the fauna of the Pleistocene to find its equal. Never before did men enjoy such hunting as fell to the lot of those roving adventurers, who first penetrated its hidden fastnesses, camped by its shrunken rivers, and galloped over its sun-scorched wastes; and, alas that it should be written, no man will ever see the like again. Fortunately, its memory will forever be kept alive in some of the books that the great hunters have written about it, such as Cornwallis Harris’ “Wild Sports of South Africa,” Gordon-Cumming’s “Hunter’s Life in South Africa,” Baldwin’s “African Hunting,” Drummond’s “Large Game and Natural History of South Africa,” and, best of all, Selous’ two books, “A Hunter’s Wanderings in South Africa” and “Travel and Adventure in Southeast Africa.” Selous was the last of the great hunters of South Africa, and no other has left books of such value as his. In central Africa the game has lasted to our own time; the hunting described by Alfred Neumann and Vaughn Kirby in the closing years of the nineteenth century was almost as good as any enjoyed by their brothers who fifty years before steered their ox-drawn wagons across the “high veldt” of the south land.

Moreover, the pencil has done its part as well as the pen. Harris, who was the pioneer of all the hunters, published an admirable illustrated folio entitled “The Game and Wild Animals of South Africa.” It is perhaps of more value than any other single work of the kind. J. G. Millais, in “A Breath from the Veldt,” has rendered a unique service, not only by his charming descriptions, but by his really extraordinary sketches of the South African antelopes, both at rest, and in every imaginable form of motion. Nearly at the other end of the continent there is an admirable book on lion-hunting in Somaliland, by Captain C. J. Melliss. Much information about big game can be taken from the books of various missionaries and explorers; Livingstone and Du Chaillu doing for Africa in this respect what Catlin did for North America.

As we have said before, one great merit of these books is that they are interesting. Quite a number of men who are good sportsmen, as well as men of means, have written books about their experiences in Africa; but the trouble with too many of these short and simple annals of the rich is, that they are very dull. They are not literature, any more than treatises on farriery and cooking are literature. To read a mere itinerary is like reading a guide-book. No great enthusiasm in the reader can be roused by such a statement as “this day walked twenty-three miles, shot one giraffe and two zebras; porter deserted with the load containing the spare boots”; and the most exciting events, if chronicled simply as “shot three rhinos and two buffalo; the first rhino and both buffalo charged,” become about as thrilling as a paragraph in Baedeker. There is no need of additional literature of the guide-book and cookery-book kind. “Fine writing” is, of course, abhorrent in a way that is not possible for mere baldness of statement, and would-be “funny” writing is even worse, as it almost invariably denotes an underbred quality of mind; but there is need of a certain amount of detail, and of vivid and graphic, though simple, description. In other words, the writer on big game should avoid equally Carlyle’s theory and Carlyle’s practice in the matter of verbosity. Really good game books are sure to contain descriptions which linger in the mind just like one’s pet passages in any other good book. One example is Selous’ account of his night watch close to the wagon, when in the pitchy darkness he killed three of the five lions which had attacked his oxen; or his extraordinary experience while hunting elephants on a stallion which turned sulky, and declined to gallop out of danger. The same is true of Drummond’s descriptions of the camps of native hunting parties, of tracking wounded buffalo through the reeds, and of waiting for rhinos by a desert pool under the brilliancy of the South African moon; descriptions, by the way, which show that the power of writing interestingly is not dependent upon even approximate correctness in style, for some of Mr. Drummond’s sentences, in point of length and involution, would compare not unfavorably with those of a Populist Senator discussing bimetallism. Drummond is not as trustworthy an observer as Selous.

The experiences of a hunter in Africa, with its teeming wealth of strange and uncouth beasts, must have been, and in places must still be, about what one’s experience would be if one could suddenly go back a few hundred thousand years for a hunting trip in the Pliocene or Pleistocene. In Mr. Astor Chanler’s book, “Through Jungle and Desert,” the record of his trip through the melancholy reed beds of the Guaso Nyiro, and of his return journey, carrying his wounded companion, through regions where the caravan was perpetually charged by rhinoceros, reads like a bit out of the unreckoned ages of the past, before the huge and fierce monsters of old had vanished from the earth, or acknowledged man as their master. An excellent book of mixed hunting and scientific exploration is Mr. Donaldson Smith’s “Through Unknown African Countries.” If anything, the hunting part is unduly sacrificed to some of the minor scientific work. Full knowledge of a new breed of rhinoceros, or a full description of the life history and chase of almost any kind of big game, is worth more than any quantity of matter about new spiders and scorpions. Small birds and insects remain in the land, and can always be described by the shoal of scientific investigators who follow the first adventurous explorers; but it is only the pioneer hunter who can tell us all about the far more interesting and important beasts of the chase, the different kinds of big game, and especially dangerous big game; and it is a mistake in any way to subordinate the greater work to the lesser.

Books on big game hunting in India are as plentiful, and as good, as those about Africa. Forsyth’s “Highlands of Central India,” Sanderson’s “Thirteen Years Among the Wild Beasts of India,” Shakespeare’s “Wild Sports of India,” and Kinloch’s “Large Game Shooting,” are perhaps the best; but there are many other writers, like Markham, Baldwin, Rice, Macintyre, and Stone, who are also very good. Indeed, to give even a mere list of the titles of the good books on Indian shooting would read too much like the Homeric catalogue of ships, or the biblical generations of the Jewish patriarchs. The four books singled out for special reference are interesting reading for anyone; particularly the accounts of the deaths of man-eating tigers at the hands of Forsyth, Shakespeare, and Sanderson, and some of Kinloch’s Himalayan stalks. It is indeed royal sport which the hunter has among the stupendous mountain masses of the Himalayas, and in the rank jungles and steamy tropical forests of India.

Hunting should go hand in hand with the love of natural history, as well as with descriptive and narrative power. Hornaday’s “Two Years in the Jungle” is especially interesting to the naturalist; but he adds not a little to our knowledge of big game. It is earnestly to be wished that some hunter will do for the gorilla what Hornaday has done for the great East Indian ape, the mias or orang.

There are many good books on American big game, but, rather curiously, they are for the most part modern. Until within the present generation Americans only hunted big game if they were frontier settlers, professional trappers, Southern planters, army officers, or explorers. The people of the cities of the old States were bred in the pleasing faith that anything unconcerned with business was both a waste of time and presumably immoral. Those who travelled went to Europe instead of to the Rocky Mountains.

Throughout the pioneer stages of American history, big game hunting was not merely a pleasure, but a business, and often a very important and in fact vital business. At different times many of the men who rose to great distinction in our after history took part in it as such: men like Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston, for instance. Moreover, aside from these pioneers who afterward won distinction purely as statesmen or soldiers, there were other members of the class of professional hunters—men who never became eminent in the complex life of the old civilized regions, who always remained hunters, and gloried in the title—who, nevertheless, through and because of their life in the wilderness, rose to national fame and left their mark on our history. The three most famous men of this class were Daniel Boone, David Crockett, and Kit Carson, who were renowned in every quarter of the Union for their skill as game-killers, Indian-fighters, and wilderness explorers, and whose deeds are still stock themes in the floating legendary lore of the border. They stand for all time as types of the pioneer settlers who won our land; the bridge-builders, the road-makers the forest-fellers, the explorers, the land-tillers, the mighty men of their hands, who laid the foundations of this great commonwealth.

There are good descriptions of big game hunting in the books of writers like Catlin, but they come in incidentally. Elliott’s “South Carolina Field Sports” is a very interesting and entirely trustworthy record of the sporting side of existence on the old Southern plantations, and not only commemorates how the planters hunted bear, deer, fox, and wildcat on the uplands and in the canebrakes, but also gives a unique description of harpooning the great devil-fish in the warm Southern waters. John Palliser, an Englishman, in his “Solitary Hunter,” has given us the best descriptions of hunting in the far West, when it was still an untrodden wilderness. Another Englishman, Ruxton, in two volumes, has left us a most vivid picture of the old hunters and trappers themselves. Unfortunately, these old hunters and trappers, the men who had most experience in the life of the wilderness, were utterly unable to write about it; they could not tell what they had seen or done. Occasional attempts have been made to get noted hunters to write books, either personally or by proxy, but these attempts have not as a rule been successful. Perhaps the best of the books thus produced is Hittell’s “Adventures of James Capen Adams, Mountaineer and Grizzly Bear Hunter.”

The first effort to get men of means and cultivation in the Northern and Eastern States of the Union to look at field sports in the right light was made by an Englishman who wrote over the signature of Frank Forrester. He did much for the shotgun men; but, unfortunately, he was a true cockney, who cared little for really wild sports, and he was afflicted with that dreadful pedantry which pays more heed to ceremonial and terminology than to the thing itself. He was sincerely distressed because the male of the ordinary American deer was called a buck instead of a stag; and it seemed to him to be a matter of moment whether one spoke of a “gang” or a “herd” of elk.

There are plenty of excellent books nowadays, however. The best book upon the old plains country was Colonel Richard Irving Dodge’s “Hunting-Grounds of the Great West,” which dealt with the chase of most kinds of plains game proper. Judge Caton, in his “Antelope and Deer of America,” gave a full account of not only the habits and appearance, but the methods of chase and life histories of the prongbuck, and of all the different kinds of deer found in the United States. Dr. Allen, in his memoir on the bisons of America, and Hornaday, in his book upon their extermination, have rendered similar service for the vast herds of shaggy-maned wild cattle which have vanished with such melancholy rapidity during the lifetime of the present generation. Mr. Van Dyke’s “Still-Hunter” is a noteworthy book, which, for the first time, approaches the still-hunter and his favorite game, the deer, from what may be called the standpoint of the scientific sportsman. It is one of the few hunting-books which should really be studied by the beginner because of what he can learn therefrom in reference to the hunter’s craft. The Century Co.’s volume “Sport With Gun and Rod” contains accounts of the chase of most of the kinds of American big game, although there are two or three notable omissions, such as the elk, the grizzly bear, and the white goat. Warburton Pike, Caspar Whitney, and Frederick Schwatka have given fairly full and very interesting accounts of boreal sport; and Pendarves Vivian and Baillie-Grohman of hunting trips in the Rockies. A new and most important departure, that of photographing wild animals in their homes, was marked by Mr. Wallihan’s “Camera Shots at Big Game.” This is a noteworthy volume. Mr. Wallihan was the pioneer in a work which is of the utmost importance to the naturalist, the man of science; and what he accomplished was far more creditable to himself, and of far more importance to others, than any amount of game-killing. Finally, in Parkman’s “Oregon Trail” and Irving’s “Trip on the Prairie,” two great writers have left us a lasting record of the free life of the rifle-bearing wanderers who first hunted in the wild Western lands.

Though not hunting-books, John Burroughs’ writings and John Muir’s volumes on the Sierras should be in the hands of every lover of outdoor life, and therefore in the hands of every hunter who is a nature lover, and not a mere game-butcher.

Of course, there are plenty of books on European game. Scrope’s “Art of Deerstalking,” Bromley Davenport’s “Sport,” and all the books of Charles St. John, are classic. The chase of the wolf and boar is excellently described by an unnamed writer in “Wolf-Hunting and Wild Sports of Brittany.” Baillie-Grohman’s “Sport in the Alps” is devoted to the mountain game of Central Europe, and is, moreover, a mine of curious hunting lore, most of which is entirely new to men unacquainted with the history of the chase in Continental Europe during the last few centuries. An entirely novel type of adventure was set forth in Lamont’s “Seasons with the Sea Horses,” wherein he described his hunting in arctic waters with rifle and harpoon. Lloyd’s “Scandinavian Adventures” and “Northern Field Sports,” and Whishaw’s “Out of Doors in Tsar Land,” tell of the life and game of the snowy northern forests. Chapman has done excellent work for both Norway and Spain. It would be impossible even to allude to the German and French books on the chase, such as the admirable but rather technical treatises of Le Couteulx de Canteleu. Moreover, these books for the most part belong rather in the category which includes English fox-hunting literature, not in that which deals with big game and the life of the wilderness. This is merely to state a difference—not to draw a comparison; for the artificial sports of highly civilized countries are strongly to be commended for their effect on national character in making good the loss of certain of the rougher virtues which tend to disappear with the rougher conditions.

In Mr. Edward North Buxton’s two volumes of “Short Stalks” we find the books of a man who is a hardy lover of nature, a skilled hunter, but not a game-butcher; a man who has too much serious work on hand ever to let himself become a mere globe-trotting rifleman. His volumes teach us just what a big game hunter, a true sportsman, should be. But the best recent book on the wilderness is Herr C. G. Schilling’s “Mit Blitzlicht und Büchse,” giving the writer’s hunting adventures, and above all his acute scientific observations and his extraordinary photographic work among the teeming wild creatures of German East Africa. Mr. Schilling is a great field naturalist, a trained scientific observer, as well as a mighty hunter; and no mere hunter can ever do work even remotely approaching in value that which he has done. His book should be translated into English at once. Every effort should be made to turn the modern big game hunter into the Schilling type of adventure-loving field naturalist and observer.

I am not disposed to undervalue manly outdoor sports, or to fail to appreciate the advantage to a nation, as well as to an individual, of such pastimes; but they must be pastimes, and not business, and they must not be carried to excess. There is much to be said for the life of a professional hunter in lonely lands; but the man able to be something more, should be that something more—an explorer, a naturalist, or else a man who makes his hunting trips merely delightful interludes in his life work. As for excessive game-butchery, it amounts to a repulsive debauch. The man whose chief title to glory is that, during an industrious career of destruction, he has slaughtered 200,000 head of deer and partridges, stands unpleasantly near those continental kings and nobles who, during the centuries before the French Revolution, deified the chase of the stag, and made it into a highly artificial cult, which they followed to the exclusion of State-craft and war-craft and everything else. James, the founder of the ignoble English branch of the Stuart kings, as unkingly a man as ever sat on a throne, was fanatical in his devotion to the artificial kind of chase which then absorbed the souls of the magnates of continental Europe.

There is no need to exercise much patience with men who protest against field sports, unless, indeed, they are logical vegetarians of the flabbiest Hindoo type. If no deer or rabbits were killed, no crops could be cultivated. If it is morally right to kill an animal to eat its body, then it is morally right to kill it to preserve its head. A good sportsman will not hesitate as to the relative value he puts upon the two, and to get the one he will go a long time without eating the other. No nation facing the unhealthy softening and relaxation of fibre which tend to accompany civilization can afford to neglect anything that will develop hardihood, resolution, and the scorn of discomfort and danger. But if sport is made an end instead of a means, it is better to avoid it altogether. The greatest stag-hunter of the seventeenth century was the Elector of Saxony. During the Thirty Years’ War he killed some 80,000 deer and boar. Now, if there ever was a time when a ruler needed to apply himself to serious matters, it was during the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, and if the Elector in question had eschewed hunting he might have compared more favorably with Gustavus Adolphus in his own generation, or the Great Elector of Brandenburg in the next generation. The kings of the House of Savoy have shown that the love of hardy field sports in no way interferes with the exercise of the highest kind of governmental ability.

Wellington was fond of fox-hunting, but he did very little of it during the period of the Peninsular War. Grant cared much for fine horses, but he devoted his attention to other matters when facing Lee before Richmond. Perhaps as good an illustration as could be wished of the effects of the opposite course is furnished by poor Louis XVI. He took his sport more seriously than he did his position as ruler of his people. On the day when the revolutionary mob came to Versailles, he merely recorded in his diary that he had “gone out shooting, and had killed eighty-one head when he was interrupted by events.” The particular event to which this “interruption” led up was the guillotine. Not many sportsmen have to face such a possibility; but they do run the risk of becoming a curse to themselves and to everyone else, if they once get into the frame of mind which can look on the business of life as merely an interruption to sport.