familiar; peradventure for that cause it struck me with a feeling more unkindly than it deserved. But apart from the natural distaste it was likely to excite upon the common principle of humanity, I was born and bred a sportsman, and the battue of the wild free birds of the air at home was a thing I could never reconcile to my prejudice— if you will. Is it, then, a matter of surprise that my heart should recoil from seeing a hecatomb of venison sacrificed without as much excitement as would go to the execution of a minuet, or as much skill as would be required for bagging a sparrow on the house-top? I am not going to rush upon the philosophy of field-sports: we will appoint to every man his taste-this shall affect a hare for the sake of the chase, that for sake of the currant jelly. But I am going to narrate a passage of woodcraft, got up for the recreation of an English monarch in the wild forests of Thuringia; and, if I am perforce to convey a just idea of it in such wise as one might sing an EasterMonday on Epping Forest, it may be allowed me to crave allowance for the delicate situation in which I am placed.

The area of the sport was one over which might appropriately have been written the motto of Dante's Inferno. All who entered it might, indeed, abandon hope. It was surrounded on three sides by barriers not to be scaled by any thing without wings; on the fourth, it was guarded by an army of chasseurs. You will suppose a herd of bucks and does driven into it, like sheep into the pens at Smithfield. At first a royal shot assails them point blank, or at what Sir Lucius O'Trigger calls "a gentlemanly distance." This misses, haply, and then another succeeds and another, each in due order of precedence. Should none of them carry their billet, then the chasseurs fire a volley, not at this or that particular individual of the sylvan company, but "into the brown of them," as the poacher says of a covey. Down they come, like leaves of autumn; but the worst remains behind. Here is one, the blood pumped out of his mouth by his sighs of agony; there, another, dragging his shattered limbs, or striving to crawl, snakelike, into some covert to die. See how they have riddled that shivering wretch that is raining gore from flank to shoulder, and not one merciful bullet has hit a vital spot! Fie, my Lord! never shoot with charges that but graze the quarry. Look, ye have only broken that fawn's leg-poor devil! how she limps along, the tears coursing down her pitiful cheeks. Well done, good Samaritan in blue blouse! There, draw thy humane knife across her throat! .

It was past noon when the wild hunt of Thuringia began, and already by one of the clock, P.M., many of the harts of grease had fallen. The royal box-that is to say, pavilion-was a battery, from which much execution was done. It was strange-passing strangeto see the Queen, now half hidden, now half revealed, as the smoke curled, and the fire flashed from the chamber within which she stood, as indifferent as if it had been her boudoir. Four royal ladies with parasols, and four royal gentlemen with fusces all on active duty, in a room twelve feet square, is a sight, I believe, that never was seen in Christendom, nor on the face of the earth, before the 29th of August, 1845. Then did the shooting go ahead in the house and out of doors, till the clock told half-past two of the afternoon, and the bugle sounded

a parley. Pass we the episodes of such cavaliers' prowess; it boots not to tell who brought his venison down at a long shot, or who did it to death within pistol-range. Had a sporting coroner sat upon the deer that lay weltering in their gore, peradventure there would have been as many verdicts of "Accidental Death" as of "Wilful Murder."

Of the latter some of the most dreadful cases, indeed, occurred ever parallelled in the Newgate Calendar. The reader will remember the body of men I spoke of as wearing blue frocks. These were in the service as butchers belonging to the retinue. These persons' duty it was to scrutinize the objects at which the august marksman fired, and finding they had more or less life left in them, to cut their throats without remorse. Lord! to see how the gentle does and graceful fawns would writhe and struggle, in the gripe of those last officers of forest law, might have turned the heart of a carcass-butcher in Leadenhall Market.... At the close of the sport the dead and dying were collected, and placed in a line along the side of the path by which her Majesty was to reach her carriage. But, though the business of the day was done, the grades chasses were peddling a little on their

own account.

While they strew'd the victims around the spot

Where the Court was about retiring,

We heard the random and farewell shot
That the foe was sullenly firing.

The number of deer slain in this couple of hours was forty-eight, of which twenty-five were stags. To these may be added at least a dozen that the hounds, laid on the trail, would find in their last agonies on the verges of the forest. Thus sixty are accounted foror a stag to every two minutes. Was not this an unheard-of massacre?

Once again I protest that no inward spirit has moved me thus to speak of the woodland pageant laid before the Queen during her German tour. No doubt German gentlemen from their youth up are trained to such exhibitions, and we know that habit is second nature. Let it be so in the forests of Thuringia; I am no Quixote of woodcraft; but oh, let it find no favour or countenance in our own land! Away with the secret, solitary vice-the battue--from merry England. I would not seem to give an importance to sporting which it does not merit; it has a popular influence, also here unknown. Englishmen think, and I know rightly, that the principle of our national sports has a healthy effect on the national character. Whatever our vices, we are not a cruel or an untrustworthy people. Fair play is the system of our sporting: fair play is the adversary of cruelty and deceit. So long, then, as they trespass neither on harmony nor kindliness, let our national sports be had in good account. It was therefore that I saw with little favour the scenes thus enacted before the sovereign of our land.

The visions of German wild boar sporting, if they are not to be as rudely dispersed by this my narrative as those of the chase of its mountain stags, will quite as effectually be got rid of at least inasmuch as relates to that sport as followed in the states of Coburg and Gotha. The boar is the last remaining of the wild beasts made the

quarry of the European sportsman of condition. It is true the wolf and the bear exist to try his mettle; but these are left to be shot down by boors and plebeian game-keepers-the noble and gentle pursue the grim grunter alone-peradventure, because he is good to eat as well as to kill. The earliest records of the nursery have handed down to us the wild boar of the German forests as a fearful monster-a chimera dire-such as might run in a curricle with the fiery dragon, which the champion of England is scen so doughtily dealing with in the order of St. George. The accounts of the field-sports practised in India have made us familiar with Oriental "pig-sticking," as griffins have irreverently denominated the chase of the wild boar in the Honourable Company's territories. We know it to be a passage in woodcraft, accomplished by gentlemen in jockey caps and jackets, mounted on slim and wiry-limbed Arabs. These, with spears, beleaguer the porker of the prairie, and having galloped the gas out of his lungs, let the life out of his corpus through holes drilled in his tough hide with orthodox steel. But the overthrow of the opprobrium of Israel nearer home has been chiefly left a mystery, vaguely hinted at by travellers who have penetrated the Hartz, or haply the Black Forest. They stake their heads, and allude to them as darkly as to the specimens of geological skeletons found in the caves of Baumons and Bielshole-fossil relics of other worlds. It was, therefore, with no ordinary feelings of excited curiosity and exaggerated anticipations, that I set out to visit the colony of savage swine, planted and protected by the reigning Duke of Saxe Coburg, in the vicinity of his chateau of Rosenau.

About four miles from Coburg, and a little to the westward of Rosenau, rise several abrupt hills, clothed to the summits with pinewoods-altogether occupying a space of a thousand acres. These are the boar preserves of his Serene Highness, and having been honoured by a visit from her most gracious Majesty Queen Victoria, they had earned for themselves a prestige beyond the common. We were directed to be in attendance on the chamberlain of the hogs at five o'clock precisely; and exactly at that hour, as we made across certain fields of flax lying between the woods and the high road, that functionary appeared, emerging from his pig penetralia. He went about the ceremonial in which he was engaged quite according to the craft or etiquette of his order. We were requested to approach the presence with gravity and decorous legerity of foot. Onward we went, treading lightly, till we arrived at a sort of parkpaling enclosure, some six feet high, and closely boarded. Entering there by a gate which closed behind us, we were shown by an ancient forester, with a mortal blunderbuss on his shoulder and a rapier by his side, into a thing like a cockney summer-house upon stilts. Within this we were shut up, among much musty hay, a party of ten in a room suited to two. On each of the four sides of the square box are peep-holes, through which we anxiously watched the process of strewing around provision of corn and potatoes, that savoured very much of the board frugal housewives at home spread for their domestic circle of bacon. Long and fearfully we waited for the guests. Sometimes the master of the ceremonies hinted perhaps they

might not come at all; and when some of the musty hay-dust elicited a sneeze from one of the party, he said he almost despaired of an arrival. But we were not destined to be so disappointed. At the end of an hour, spent about as agreeably as the time was consumed in the black hole of Calcutta, a vidette at the peep-holes cautiously gave the words "here they come." And sure enough there they did come, as orderly and well behaved as if they had been borne in, in rashers, and ornamented with poached eggs. First marched a matron of the sty, accompanied by a very numerous family-quaint little roasters-like nothing in zoology so much as hedgehogs upon a large scale. Anon, through all the loop-holes opened for their admission, trooped boars, singly and in parties, but save an occasional poke in the spare-ribs, given by the snake-like snout of some bully to a more gently disposed sow- -(the ladies were the most quarrelsome) -all went off very tamely. Thus did the feast proceed till the potatoes and corn were consumed, or so much of them as these ravenous creatures were disposed to discuss, for all went about their afternoon meal as gingerly as a Paris élégante flirts with an ice and imaginary biscuits.

The wild boars of this district have indeed the characteristics of coming of a race not exactly bred to pass from their nurses into sausages. They give you the idea of a cross between the wolf and domestic swine, but retain apparently no trace of their savage origin, except a look of cunning and an apparent instinct of misanthropy. The least move we made was instantly detected, and acknowledged; but that was all. The herd made no manifestation of flight. They are as unpoetic and unvalorous a race as those that frequent the trough of the English farmer-at least, those we saw-and their hunting offers no features of enterprise beyond the slaying of pigeons at the Red-house. When a boar is to be shot the herd is enticed to dinner in the enclosure already spoken of. Then, all but the devoted one being scared away, the trap-doors of the loop-holes are closed, and the sportsman, ascending a sort of box-like the distance-chair of our race-courses-quietly administers a leaden pill to his patient. The reigning Duke kills a vast number this way every season he keeps up a herd of nearly two thousand.

Benedict observes, "When I said I should die a bachelor, I never thought I should live to be married.". In like manner, when I have anathematized the practice of stag-hunting, little did I dream I should ever travel a thousand miles from my own particular penates to see venison done to death wholesale to the air of a polka. As regards the pigs, I will hold my peace. It is sad enough that the glowing wild wood romances, peopled with belted knights in Lincoln green, grim yagers, gaunt hounds, and all the pomp and circumstance of sylvan warfare, should be translated into this Smithfield edition which truth compels me to publish. The sporting reader, who would yet see attach to the recesses of the Hartz some relic of the olden machinery, shall at least be spared the pain of reflecting the complexion to which the savage boar of the Black Forest has come at last-what time he sticks his matutinal fork into the segment of a Cambridge sausage.

No sooner had the glorious meeting at Goodwood terminated, than the notice of the approaching regatta at Cowes attracted my attention. The " cut-away coat" with the G.R.C. buttons was put away, and the blue jacket and trowsers, the pilot coat, and the "norwester" were got ready. An invitation to join a small squadron, who sail under the orders of that truly popular and liberal supporter of all British sports, the Earl Fitzhardinge, was gladly accepted, and upon a fine morning in August I left Brighton to report myself to the Commodore. When I drove up to the Blue Coach Office, in Castlesquare, how different was the scene to what it used to be in the good old times of coaching. The "Prince of Wales," Southampton, was at the door, and as times go, was tolerably well horsed; but, instead of seeing two or three well-appointed drags ready to proceed to London, a few over-loaded heavy-looking "busses" were waiting to pick up passengers for the rail. The journey was most agreeable, as all journeys are by road in fine weather; the harvest was looking well, and as I was fortunate enough to get seated near a gentleman who the previous week had been engaged in the grand cricket match between Sussex and Marylebone, and who enlightened me considerably upon many interesting points of that truly national game, the time passed most quickly, so much so, that when I reached Cosham, from whence I was to "fly" it to Portsmouth, I could scarcely believe that I had got over the two-and-forty miles. The Cowes' steamer was just about to start as I drove up to the Victoria pier, and landed me in the island just as the dinner flag was hoisted on board the Imogine. There I found the noble owner, surrounded with the officers of his squadron.

Milner Gibson, Esq., M.P.-Sea Flower.
Albany Fonblanque, Esq.-Ariel.

Captain Claxton, R.N.-Jilt.

Hon. Augustus Berkeley-St. Margaret.

And Lord George Lennox, who acted as flag-lieutenant to the Commodore.

The following morning was lovely, and it was a goodly sight to see the harbour and roads full of yacht "craft." The Pearl, the Alarm,