spot whence they had set out a few days before in such pomp and splendour, he was not easy in his mind about his precious and unused artillery till he had actually deposited it safely within the walls of Albany. Hither soon after came Amherst, hastening from Louisbourg with his freshlygathered laurels and three thousand men; but it was by that time too late in the season, and the end of all things American for the French was not to come yet. Poor Abercromby here fades out of history. Tradition says that he and Wolfe returned to England in the same ship, a strangely assorted pair! Fortunately when the name of Abercromby recurs to Englishmen, they think of Egypt and not of America, of a glorious victory and not of a lamentable defeat.

Another generation was yet to wake the echoes of these sublime solitudes with a strife as bitter and in a cause not less momentous. But all this seems now equally remote. The very majesty of the scenes themselves invite us even now to people them in fancy with the motley and picturesque battalions that for half a century more or less made them their battlefield. The English traveller may even fancy that the strains which he now hears floating over the tops of the hemlocks and maples are the band of the old Royal Rousillon, till he awakes to the fact that it is music from the ball room of a hotel; or he may imagine the craft that fleck the blue surface of the lake to be propelled by the sinewy arms of leather-frocked rangers or painted Iroquois, till some panting steamer with its huge paddle-wheel

destroys the illusion and reminds him that they probably contain shopmen from Albany and school-mistresses from Boston. But the old gray walls of Fort Ticonderoga still moulder amid the throb of modern life, and beneath the feet of hurrying tourists or under the wheels even of screaming engines, or sometimes even yet, no doubt, amid the murmur of the old pines and hemlocks, still sleep the dead who fell here by thousands when the fate of America was yet hanging in the balance. How far they came and what a mixture of men were they whose bones now mingle with the dust of these historic shores : fresh-faced lads from Devon homesteads; sinewy Gaels from the yet savage Highlands; swarthy Frenchmen from the slopes of the Pyrenees; wild Canadians from the banks of the St. Lawrence; or fair-haired Germans fighting for all sides in turn. Here, too, lies the quaint colonial soldier of the three-cornered hat and coarse blue uniform, far enough from the Jersey village or Massachusetts churchyard, where still sleep his forbears, and his children, and his children's children. And there too, last but by no means least, reposes the dust of the most striking figure perhaps of all this motley bygone throng, the fearless ranger of the wilderness, whom Cooper has made live for ever in the person of Leatherstocking. With his fringed huntingshirt, his mocassins and long unerring rifle, but above all with his amazing nerve and iron frame, his valorous self-confidence and inexhaustible resource, he must ever, above all his contemporaries, hold our fancy.

In a previous paper under this title we wrote of the fragment of manuscript which represents the earliest treatise on sport that exists in our language. We now turn to the more important work which follows it, THE MASTER OF THE GAME, dedicated, as the following extract shows, to Henry of Monmouth, Prince of Wales.

To the honour and reverence of you, my right worshipful and dread lord, Henry, by the grace of God eldest son and heir unto the excellent and Christian prince Henry the Fourth.

I, your own in every humble wise, am minded to make this little simple book, which I recommend and submit to your noble and wise correction; the which book shall, if it like to your foresaid Lordship, be named and called Mayster of the Game. and though it be so, my dear lord, that many an one could better have made the same and eke more cunningly than I, yet two things there be that principally have bolded me and caused me this work to make on hand : the first is trust of your noble correction; the second that though I unworthy be, I am Master of the Game with that noble prince your father, for I would not that his hunters nor yours, that be or should come hereafter, were unknown in the perfectness of this art of hunting.

So opens, with true author's modesty, the earliest book on sport, deserving that name, in our language. Who was the writer, unless that Edmund Langley who was Master of the Game to his nephew King Richard the Second, we cannot tell.

When

it was written we can say no more positively than that it was at some time between the years 1413 and 1422 when Prince Harry was still sowing his wild oats with Poins and Falstaff and the immortal company that gathered round him.

A little simple book the author calls it; and a small thing it is in truth, but by no means his own. It is taken bodily from the French of Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix, who was one of the best sportsmen that ever lived; and it is on that account one of the best sporting books that we have ever read. Though never yet printed, as the translator had hoped, for the benefit of the hunters that should come after, it is worthier of the honour than nine-tenths of the ephemeral stuff that is poured down upon us every day, not only as a treatise on hunting, but as a specimen of early English prose.

For our translator, like his original, is a true sportsman, a man who delights in the chase because it brings him nearer to nature. Also he has read Chaucer and caught some of Chaucer's infection; for though he quotes him but once by name, yet the poet's spirit may be traced in many a passage. He is at pains to prove, after the manner of the Frenchman before him, that hunting is not only a delightful but a strictly moral pursuit, tending to keep men clear of the seven deadly sins and lead them to paradise eternal; but these philosophic reflections are pale and colourless beside the description of the innocent pleasures of sport.

For when the hunter riseth in the morning he seeth a sweet and fair morrow and the clear weather and bright, and heareth the song of the small fowls, the which singen sweetly with great melody and full of love, every one in his language in the best wise that he may. After that, he heareth of his own kind, and when the sun is arise, he shall see the fresh dew

upon the small twigs and grass, and the sun which by his virtue shall make them shine, and that is great joy and liking to the hunter's heart.

Yes, indeed, Edmund Langley (if you were he that wrote these words), it is great joy and liking to the true hunter's heart. "Dash it, what a morning it is," says honest Mr. Jorrocks when he turns out early for the last day of the season. "Blessed if I don't get up at five o'clock in the morning every day for the rest of my life." The thought is the same in the mind of the city grocer of the nineteenth and the royal hunter of the fourteenth century, both alike good sportsmen. Some of us, too, in our humble fashion have shared in this great joy and liking. We have ridden in the chill September mornings many a long mile through glistening lanes, have climbed the highest ridge of Exmoor and seen the sun sweep away the mist below us, bringing half Devon, with Lundy and Hartland and the sea, before our eyes; and then, turning our back upon it, have cantered on through dripping grass and heather, past frozen turf-pits and brown moorwaters till we struck the sea again, and arrived at what our author calls the "semble or gathering" and what we call the meet, where men said in effect as they said in the fourteenth century: "Lo! here a great hart, a deer of high meating and pasturing; go we move him." And this too, as our writer fails not to remark, is a great joy and liking.

But to enjoy any chase as a sportsman should, a man must know the habits both of his quarry and of his hounds; and to this end each several beast, both of venery and of chase, must have a chapter to itself.

So we

begin with the hare, which is a good little beast, of much sport and of better liking to hunt than any other, were it not that she is so little; and

pass next to the hart, which is a beast of marvellous great cunning and wonder-perilous, for, as the proverb says, "After the boar the leech, and after the hart the bier." Then follow in due order the buck, the roe, the boar, and the wolf; the fox, "which stinketh evermore," the grey, or badger, which liveth more by sleeping than anything else, the otter, and finally the cat, of which last our author dares well say that if any beast has the devil's strain in him it is he, whether wild or tame. Martins and polecats are left undescribed, for no hunter goeth to wood with intent to hunt them, though if he fail to find a fox he may gladly chase either of them. Finally the cony is left severely alone, inasmuch as men hunt them only with ferrets and "long small hays," which we understand to be nets. Nevertheless the cony enjoys a certain distinction, for none other beast in England save him alone is called riot, a fact which some of us, who use the word far too loosely, would do well to remember.

But readers must not think that the various beasts are lightly passed over. On the contrary, the nature of every one with his times, his seasons, his habits, his wiles, his food, his goings out and his comings in, is described with astonishing minuteness and accuracy, leaving little or nothing for us moderns to add, and offering us a good deal that we may advantageously learn. And though the hart, as the noblest of all beasts of venery and the most crafty of quarries, receives the greatest share of attention, yet boar and wolf, buck and roe are in no wise neglected. Perhaps the most curious example, out of many, of the close study to which one and all have been subjected is the account of their voices. Thus, stags "singen in their language which men call bellowing"; bucks also bellow,

Moreover, our author has a good word to say for the chase of all these beasts. He does not despise the hare because he has hunted fox, nor the fox because he has hunted deer; but he gives to every one his proper meed of praise. The roe in particular is favoured with much eulogy; and those who have hunted him (they are not, we fancy, many) will be interested to hear how the roe was rated in the palmy days of sport. "If the roe-buck were as fair a beast as a hart," says our author, "I hold that it were a fairer hunting than of the hart, for it is a good hunting and lasteth all the year, and of great mastery, for they run right long and ginnously [craftily]

it is a diverse beast for he doth nothing after the manner of any other beast." In fact, it is pretty clear that then, as now, men shrank from the chase of the roe owing to the extreme difficulty of catching him, and to the smallness of his size when caught. Perquisites, it must be remembered, counted for a good deal in the old days, when a large number of prickers, foresters, relay-men and other attendants, both mounted and afoot, were brought into the field. Men would run themselves to a standstill after a good stag, for his death meant venison for all, and for the more fortunate additional welcome spoil.

What shall he have that killed the deer? His leather skin and horns to wear. This is no fanciful jingle but the rhymed record of an ancient custom ; and to this day the deer's skin is the huntsman's perquisite in Devon

1 In the text the word vixen is written indifferently foxen, or fixen (Germ. Füchsin).

and Somerset. But it was quite another thing to tire men, horses, and hounds as much as though a stag were a-chase, and finally run into a scrap of a beast without horns, skin, or venison worth the naming.

Another good point in our English adapter is his sceptical common sense. There is no beast in the world to which more legendary virtues are attributed than the stag; partly owing to the tale of St. Hubert, partly to a supposed antipathy of stags towards serpents, partly to a peculiar mass of gristle, in the shape of a cross, which is found in the animal's heart. A whole book might be written on the miraculous power of the hart, and the efficacy of different parts of him against the troubles of this evil world. Fouilloux, in the sixteenth century, gives a long list, and Master Robert Topsel fills page upon page with them; but our author in his solid English fashion is chary of accepting such stories. Men say, he admits, that when a stag is right old he heateth a serpent with his foot till she be wroth, and then eateth her, and then goeth to drink, and then runneth hither and thither till the water and venom be meddled together, and maketh him cast all his evil humours that he had in his body, and maketh his flesh come all new, but, he adds, with the solemnity of Herodotus himself, "thereof make I none affirmation." And this phrase occurs again and again, for the Count of Foix is too great and noble a hunter that any assertion of his should be laughed at.

But it is when he comes to speak of hounds that, like his original before him, he waxes most enthusiastic; and in truth how can any man pretend to call himself a true sportsman who is not fond of hounds? Gaston de Foix says boldly that he never saw man who loved hounds and their work that had not many good customs in him;

"For it cometh to him of great nobleness and gentleness of heart, of what estate soever the man be of, a great lord or a little, a poor or a rich." And it must be remembered that this Gaston was no mere jolly squire, but a courteous, polished, and accomplished gentleman, who could fight as well as hunt, and loved music and poetry only less than the chase; so that the sentiment, besides that it came first from his mouth, is not the idle commonplace which it sounds to our ears. "An hound," says our author, "is the most reasonable and best knowing of any beast that ever God made; yea, in some case I neither outtake [except] man nor other thing; for men find so much noblesse in hounds always from day to day that there is no man that may believe it, but he were a good skilful hunter and well-knowing and that hath haunted them long."

And therewith follow two chosen anecdotes to exhibit the nobleness of hounds; of the faithful dog that, when his master had been basely slain and cast into a river, leaped in and drew out the body with his teeth, and made a great pit with his claws and with his muzzle, "in the best wise that he might," and watched over the corpse till the king came by; all told as one might tell it to a child, with the simple dignity that almost makes scepticism ashamed. But after all, as our translator has perceived, it is not the reader of anecdotes, nor even the owner of a sagacious favourite, that will best appreciate hounds, but the skilful hunter and well-knowing, who has haunted them long. Hounds are to other dogs what soldiers are to other men; and just as it is in war that men are put to the extreme test, so it is in the chase that hounds show of what stuff they are really made. The sight of a hound rearing on his hind legs to sniff bushes above him which may have been brushed by a deer, is

worth all the anecdotes that ever appeared in THE SPECTATOR.

1

It is hardly to be wondered at, therefore, that almost a third part of our treatise is devoted to hounds, to their kennels, their breeding, and, above all, their ailments. Page upon page is filled with symptoms and disorders and cures, from the seven kinds of rage, or madness, to sore feet. Thus, if a hound be afflicted with the falling woodness, one remedy is to carry him to the sea and let nine waves pass over him, which, though our author opines that it be but little help, is likely to have at least the merit of ending the poor animal's sufferings. Again, hounds are liable to be "malencolious" and to develope mange as a consequence, when a variety of curious mixtures may be compounded to anoint them withal; or, again, they may suffer from throatevil, in which case buttered eggs are most beneficial. Some of the remedies, especially for more simple diseases, are, as the veterinary surgeon wrote to Geoffrey Gambado, equally efficacious with man or beast; and not a few are in full use to this day. But none the less our author sorrowfully confesses that he cannot overcome the one great failing of hounds, that they live not long enough." "What a pity it is," says Mr. Jorrocks, "that we cannot put new legs to old noses "; and there are few masters of hounds who have not made the same lamentation.

Nevertheless it would seem that the training of hounds was not always very perfect in old days. For instance, it is ordained, when men go forth to chase the hare, that some of the horsemen shall keep outside the hounds to right and left, and some well in front, "with long rods in their hands" to rouse her, and "blow, rechase, halloo, and set the hounds on 1 German, Wuth, madness.