The Press.
London, England, 1853-06-11 00:00:00

SATURDAY,

neither the spirit to strive for, nor the foresight to
demand
Here for the present we pause, and, referring
all our recently -published revelations on Party
to their appropriate place in the foregoing
classification of political phenomena, we
will
criticise them in detail.

Solitary Rambles and Adventures of a Hunter in
the Prairies. By John Palliser, Esq. Lon-
don: Murray.
THE spirit of" Sport"—as philosophers tell us
—is an inheritance from our ancestors, the
noble savages who ran wild in woods, " ere the
first laws of tyranny began." According to
their theory, the triumph with which the fox-
hunter first in at the death waves the brush
over his head in token of his presence at the
" crowner's quest" held, with the relics of the
puck for jurymen, over Reynard's carcass; the
glee of the crack shot when emptying out
thirty-three brace and a half of birds from his
game-bag, the trophies of his well-spent day
on the heather ; the harder-earned, life-endur-
ing pride of the deerstalker while bringing
home the thickly-tined antlers which will pro-
claim to coming generations the victory that
skill, patience, and the grooved bore have ena-
bled him to achieve in some Highland glen over
its ancient denizens—each and all of these ecs-
tatic moments, which break the monotony and
gild the medium tint of modern civilisation, owe
their raptures to the reminiscences of that pri-
mitive time when men depended solely upon
their success in hunting for their chance of a din-
ner. However worthless the quarry, or artificial
the danger of our present pursuit—with what-
ever ingenuity we may have to surround our
chase with fictitious difficulties, may hedge it in
with the etiquette of" law," and enhance its value
by contrivances which elevate the Jerez nature
into articles of costly transfer in Leadenhall
Market, or at Messrs. Haines'—the germ of
reality lying at the bottom of all these fictions
and all this fashion derives its origin from
those ancient contests wherein men pursued
the genus cervus for their subsistence, and
fought with the genus /Ms for bare life. Bri-
tish barons came in with the Conqueror, but
British sportsmen partake the heritage and
the triumphs of Nimrod. If as hunters they
are not so" mighty" as their great ancestor, it is
the beast's fault., and not theirs. The Saxon Mo-
narch who victimised the wolves, and the
Knights of the Round Table who exterminated
the dragons, have materially interfered with the
development of modern sport. Modern Nim-
rodism languishes for lack of real dangers and
a nobler prey.
What our true sportsmen cannot find in rail-
roaded England, however, they seek in more
distant climes. Gordon Cumming has taught
us that British pluck and Trulock's rifles may
encounter single-handed the densest paehy-
derniata and fiercest earnivora of the African
forests. To this example in one quarter of the
globe Mr. Palliser has now added his own ex-
perience in another. Seduced by the sheer love
of sport, he traversed :3,000 miles of sea, and
twice as much of land; plunged into the
abysses of the American prairies ; threaded,
rifle in hand, the vast forests haunted by Red
Men and Grisly Bears which cover the broad
flanks of the Rocky Mountains ; descended, over
the ice in winter, and in his slender skiff in
summer, the headlong streams which lead from
their snowy summits to the remote outposts
of the American Fur and English Hudson's
Bay Companies ; and emerged at length into a
region of civilised life, French toilettes and
polkas, after having starved for three days to-
gether when game was scarce, and clothed in
garments self-made from the skins of the black-
tailed deer, when his last " continuations
made by a professional schneider had given
way under the rude wear and tear of a hunter's
life in the " far west."
Our readers will have discovered that we
look upon Mr. Palliser as no common traveller,
and on his " Solitary Rambles" as no common
book. It is not everybody who will journey to
the Yellow Stone River to shoot bison, and
when there feel discontented, and wander yet
farther afield in order to get a chance at the
risly Bears. Nor is it a common hook which,
written by no bookmaker, contains the records