The Sun.
London, England, 1866-08-20 00:00:00

Of Sporting in General.

The facetious correspondent of the Racing Times
writes on the above subject as follows :--
The " seasons" of London and Paris have both
passed away, and our general masses are let loose
to enjoy themselves. Racing and its attendant
pleasures and evils do not wholly engross the Bri-
tish mind ; there are other sports indulged in, and
their name is legion. Personally lam but a very
sorry hand with a gun, and not the only one to
shoot folly as it flies, the fowling-piece required for
which, although made of much the same material as
the other, is charged with ammunition of a different
character, so Captain (steel) Pen and Capt. Rifle
pursue their amusements each after his fashion, and
the proselytes gained by one ought not in anywise
to be envied by the other simply because there is
room enough for all. Shooting in the common or
poorer preserves of London, viz., St. Giles's-in-the-
Fields, St. George's-in-the-Fields, Jockey-fields,
Cat and Mutton-fields, and the several parks from
•the royal one of Hyde to the smaller of Barnsbury
and Whetstone, has of late years been gradually
falling off, and is now chiefly confined to lunar
sporting—in vulgar parlance, shooting the moon,
and permanently indulged in shortly before quarter
day. The needless glut of railroads also destroy many
of the nooks and corners of old England without
the slightest question of their usefulness or neces-
sity, and are generated only by scheming lawyers,
engineers, and contractors, who ruthlessly combine
to take away thousands of acres of surface land
every year for their own especial aggrandisement,
and force upon deluded shareholders bright hopes
of large dividends, which mostly end in utter loss.
This state of thinge is generally felt by the lovers of
the chase, and a melancholy shudder affects the old
sportsman as he reads advertisements of packs
of hounds to be sold, and paragraphs that
Sir Harry So-and-so is giving up such and
such a hunt which he and his ancestors
had held for so many years. The advance of wealth
brings into the field large numbers of our trading
community, who make up remarkably well, mount
first-rate horses,:and hope one day to become county
men. In the season hunting tickets are issued by
most of the large railway companies, and a hundred
miles out twice or thrice a week and back to dinner
in the evening is nothing to your modern cit. of
capital. As to shooting, general English game,
such fabulous sums are asked for " Manors" that
an ordinary Cockney sportsman would scarce pay
his powder, shot, and license ; it is the same with
moor and forest sports in Scotland, where an inex-
perienced votary to the pursuit of grouse, black
game, or the noble stag, is pretty certain to be done
in his hirings, and laughed at by the Scotch savages
left to point out the best grounds and pilot the
Greenhorn in search of that which he will have
much trouble in finding.
My attention has recently been called to a little
work just published by Blackwoods,* forming a
collection of articles reprinted from an Edinburgh
weekly journal, and combining every possible
method of destroying game and fish. It is not my
province to review the book, inasmuch as I have
actually read it, but there is a degree of self-im-
portance in the writer's record of his prowess that
.will be found quite charming to all aspirants for
spotting fame ; from it we learn that superiority in
pluck and endurance of hardship, which have given
the British Islands supremacy, are due to-out-of
door recreations, and that those who loved the hunt-
ing field and grouse mountain make in nine cases
out of ten better military officers, where real busi-
ness was to be done, than soldiers bred in
the ordinary way. This statement ought not
to prejudice the hundreds of thousands comprising

*SPORTING DAYS.—By John Colquhouu, author of " The
Moon and the Loeb," " Salmon Casts and Stray Shots,"
Ste. Wu, Dlaoliwood and Sons, Edinburgh and London,
1866.