It is all very well in a pastoral poem to use a kind of clap-trap for the applause of a certain grade, to carp at the noble as requiring

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Space for his lake, his park's extended bounds,
Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds."

Our poet quite overlooked the number of persons employed, and the money circulated by the pursuits requiring the space he grudges the noble possessor.

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What he says of their usurping the space that

many poor supplied," is sheer nonsense; such Utopian ideas alone would have been sufficient to prove him what he was, a very pretty poet and a very weak man.

“A time there was, ere England's griefs began,

When every rood of ground maintain'd its man."

A very catching couplet to those who can believe such a state of things practicable or possible. Poets certainly have a licence, and the poet in question has used it most freely, for when England's griefs began is rather an indefinite period to hit upon, and when every rood of ground maintained its man is a state of things that never did exist, will exist, or could exist.

As one of these domains, where there is space for all those appurtenances to a nobleman that are so reproachfully alluded to by the poet, and

SO THINGS ARE, AND SO THEY MUST BE. 13

where a pack of fox-hounds has been long kept on a princely scale by the best of sportsmen, we will suppose the estates of the Duke of Cleveland to be subdivided till every rood of ground, for the time being, had its man. Could any one be absurd enough to suppose it would continue thus? It would not over one harvest; some, from idleness, bad management, or bad habits, would find they could not hold their own; a more prudent or better managing neighbour takes it, and adds it to his own, and probably the late owner of the added rood assists the new possessor in its culture: here in the first, not only generation, but season, one becomes doubly possessed, and the other a labourer; as possessions and wealth accumulate, so do the means of acquiring increased wealth. The careful man adds rood by rood to his property, till he possesses ten roods; nine of his neighbours become labourers; and of those who still retain their rood, he, as relates to them, becomes a large landed proprietor, they only a step above the labourer: he is to them what the wealthy farmer, holding a thousand acres, and riding hunting, is to the man tilling a hundred and holding his own plough: and thus, as now, in the course of time would Raby Castle again own one master.

If every individual living had the same talent, the same industry, habits, and disposition, if we gave each similar possessions and means, each

might, for a considerable time, retain an equal position in society; but even under such circumstances, ill-luck or ill-health would shortly dispossess one, while it enriched another: and it is quite proper it should be so; for, supposing Great Britain could give an acre of land to each inhabitant, instead of a rich and enlightened nation, we should be a set of Boors, without sense enough to carry on the common cause of all. It is not as Goldsmith describes, even among savage tribes, for with them the best hunter gets the most skins, and the best warrior the most sway.

The poor, feeling the shoe that pinches them, are induced to envy and decry the rich and great; they do this from looking at the picture in a wrong light. They can scarcely be expected to believe the fact, that virtually it is by the rich and great that the poorer live; in fact, without the great the little could not live, for do away with the great, the poor would become slaves here, or pretty much the same thing, to other nations: if, therefore, every noble and man of wealth could be induced to do what equalisers would wish, namely, distribute his patrimony till he gave a thousand families a hundred a year, and left himself with the same income, so far from benefiting mankind, he would be taking a most effectual step towards striking at the root of common welfare.

Avaunt! then, ye who only rail at the great and

SPORTSMEN PERSONIFIED.

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noble because their position is one for which you were not designed and are not fitted. Avaunt! ye soulless beings, who decry the glories of the Chase because you have not hearts or means to enjoy it. While Old England stands pre-eminent among nations, so will its aristocracy stand among men; and while this lasts, so will the glorious Chase stand pre-eminent among our national sports and pastimes.

I am quite willing to admit that the man whose avocation carries him no further than from Lothbury or Fenchurch to Clapham Common, and whose appurtenances of his pursuits are comprised in pen, ink, paper, wax, wafer, seal and sand, may have in him the germ of a hero's courage and enthusiasm; but he who has stood conspicuous in bold relievo amongst his comrades in the burst of blaze in a dozen sieges, leaves no doubt of the materials he is made of; and the man who, cap in hand, rattles along his pack of fox-hounds at a racing pace, shows at once the soul that is in him; and what he does will always be done "en prince," whether it be bearding a tyrant potentate and defying his threatened vengeance, or soothing the wretched applicant and relieving his gaunt necessities.

A sportsman is, perhaps, among the generality of men, a somewhat indefinite term. Each man who follows any sort of sport calls himself a

sportsman in his way, he certainly is so. The walking gentleman on the stage is an actor, but not quite John Kemble or Talma.

Angling is a sport; and the illiberal cynic who described it as a rod with a worm at one-extremity and a fool at the other, exemplified his own definition; for the best, the wisest, and most gifted have been anglers. There is not, in a general way, certainly, much excitement in the pursuit, and I should be apt to consider the man who preferred it to robuster sports to be one with little enthusiasm in his composition, probably a very amiable and estimable man; but my foxhunting predilections would never allow me to consider such a mhan a sportsman, unless he was one who angled, when, from some cause or other, he could not hunt.

Shooting is unquestionably sporting; and if a man shot because or when he could not hunt, I should par excellence call him a sportsman; but if by choice he went pottering about with a brace of pointers when he could enjoy the sight of fiveand-twenty couples of fox-hounds finding, and in chase, I must say I should hold him somewhat slow as a sportsman; in fact, courtesy alone would induce me to call him one. "The squire" shot, it is true, and so do hundreds of our first-flight men as fox-hunters; and whether it was a pigeon or a partridge Osbaldiston shot enthusiastically;