that the most puny and base of the human kind can bear away the prize?
The reverend sportsman, instead of slaying the innocent and peaceful tenants of the fields and woods, ought to declaim against such inhumanity and murder in the pulpit, and practice the doctrine himself; but how can this be expected when many hundred thousand lives have been sacrificed in contentions concerning the tenets of Christianity?
Oh, laugh or mourn with me the rueful jest,
a cassock'd huntsman!
He takes the field. The master of the pack
cries, "Well done, saint!" and claps him on the back.
Is this the path of sanctity? Is this
to stand a way.mark in the road to bliss?—Cowper.
Lord Chesterfield says, Letter 262, that "the French manner of hunting is gentleman-like; our's is only for bumpkins and boobies. The poor beasts are here pursued and run down by much greater beasts than themselves; and the true British fox-hunter is most undoubtedly a species appropriated and peculiar to this country, which no other part of the globe produces."
There are many who quiet the dictates of conscience, by alleging, that "They prefer the business of hunting and shooting, for the sake of exercise, and not for the pleasure of pursuing and destroying animals." The pretence is fallacious, because the exercise of riding may be taken without hunting; and the exercise of walking without shooting. How much superior are the amusements of gardening and agriculture, and how much more innocent are the diversions of bowls, cricket, fives, and such like gymnastics!
Much has been said respecting the propensity of
