Did we intend to remain here much longer, we should be compelled in self-defence to clear the neighbourhood. This is not so impracticable as at first sight may appear. We have made acquaintance with a very pleasant fellow of a Bauldy—quite a genius in his way—who has a natural talent for the French horn. To him an old key-bugle would be an inestimable treasure, and we doubt not that with a few instructions he would become such a proficient as to serenade the suburb day and night. Nor would our conscience reproach us for having made one human creature supremely happy, even at the cost of the emigration of a few dozen others. But fortunately we have no need to recur to any such experiment. To-morrow we shall enact the part of Macgregor with our foot upon our native heather; and for one evening, wherever the locality, we could not find a more apt or pleasant companion than Mr Charles St John, whose sporting journals are at last published in the Home and Colonial Library.
We make this preliminary statement the more readily, because for divers reasons we had hardly expected to find the work so truly excellent of its kind; and had there been any shortcomings, assuredly we should have been foul of St John. In the first place, we entertained, and do still entertain, the opinion that very few English sportsmen are capable of writing a work which shall treat not only of the Wild Sports, but of the Natural History of the Highlands. They belong to a migratory class, and seldom exchange the comforts of their clubs for the inconveniences of northern rustication, at least before the month of June. Now and then, indeed, you may meet with some of them, whose passion for angling amounts to a mania, by the side of the Tweed or the Shin, long before the mavis has hatched her young. But these are usually elderly grey-coated men, whose whole faculties are bent upon hackles—the patriarchs of a far nobler school than that of Walton—magnificent throwers of the fly—salmonicides of the first water—yet in our humble estimation not very conversant with any other subject under heaven. Their sporting error—rather let us call it misfortune—is that they do not generalise. By the middle of September their occupation for the year is over. Shortly afterwards they assemble, like swallows about to leave our shores, on the banks of the Tweed, which river is permitted by the mercy of the British Parliament to remain open for a short time longer. There they angle on, kill their penultimate and ultimate fish; and finally, at the approach of winter, retreat to warmer quarters, and recapitulate the campaigns of the summer over port of the most generous vintage. These are clearly not the men to indite the Wild Sports and Natural History of the North.
The other section of English sportsmen come later and depart a little earlier. They are the renters of moors, crack sportsmen in every sense of the word, who resort to Ross-shire as regularly as they afterwards emigrate to Melton. Now, as to their slaughtering powers, we entertain not the shadow of a doubt. Steady shots and deadly are they from their youth upwards—trained, it may be, upon level ground, but still unerring in their aim. If not so wiry-sinewed, and sound of wind as the Caledonian, their pluck is undeniable, and their perseverance praiseworthy in the extreme. Show them the birds, and they will bring them to bag—give them a fair chance at a red-deer, and the odds are that next minute he shall be rolling in blood upon the heather. But this, let it be observed, is after all a mere matter of tooling. To be a good shot is only one branch of the finished sportsman's accomplishment, and it enters not at all into the conformation of the naturalist. We would not give a brace of widgeons for the best description ever written of a week's sport in the Highlands, or indeed any where else, provided it contained nothing more than an account of the killed and wounded, some facetious anecdotes regarding the lives of the gillies, and a narrative of the manner in which the author encountered and overcame a hart. Even the adventures of a night in a still will hardly make the book go down. We want an eye accustomed to look to other things beyond the sight of a gun-barrel—we want to know more about the quarry than the mere fact that it was flushed, fired at, and killed. Death can come but once to the black-cock as to the warrior, but are their lives to be accounted as nothing? Ponto we allow to be a beautiful brute—a little too thin-skinned, perhaps, for the moors, and apt, in case of mist, to lapse into a state of ague—yet, notwithstanding, punctual at his points, and cheap at twenty guineas of the current money of the realm. Howbeit we care not for his biography. To us it is matter of the smallest moment from what breed he is descended, by whose gamekeeper he was broken, neither are we covetous as to statistics of the number of his brothers and sisters uterine. It is of course gratifying to know that our southern acquaintance approves of the sport he has met with in a particular district; and that on the twelfth, not only the bags but the ponies were exuberantly loaded with a superfluity of fud and feather. Such intelligence would have been listened to most benignly had it been accompanied by a box of game duly addressed to us at Ambrose's—as it is, we accept the fact without any spasm of extraordinary pleasure.
There are, we allow, some sporting tours from which we have derived both profit and gratification; but the locality of these is usually remote and unexplored. We like to hear of salmon-fishing in the Naamsen, and of forty and fifty pounders captured in its brimful rapids—of bear-skalls in Sweden, buffalo-hunting in the prairies, or the chase of the majestic lion in Caffreland or Morocco. Such narratives have the charm of novelty; and if, now and then, they border a little upon the marvellous or miraculous, we do our best to summon up faith sufficient to bolt them all. We by no means objected to Monsieur Violet's account of the estampades in California, or of the snapping turtles in the cane-brakes of the Red River. He was, at all events, graphic in his descriptions; and the zoology to which he introduced us, if not genuine, was of a gigantic and original kind. In fact, no sort of voyage or travel is readable unless it be strewn thickly with incident and adventure, and these of a startling character. Nobody cares now-a-days about meteorological observations, or dates, or distances, or names of places; we have been tired with these things from the days of Dampier downwards. Nor need any navigator hope to draw the public attention to his facts unless he possesses besides a deal of the talent of the novelist. If incident does not lie in his path, he must go out of his way to seek it—if even then it should not appear, there is an absolute necessity for inventing it. What a book of travels in Central Africa could we not write, if any one would be kind enough to furnish us with a mere outline of the route, and the authentic soundings of the Niger!
Scotland, however, is tolerably well known to the educated people of the sister country, and her productions have ceased to be a marvel. Grouse are common as howtowdies in the London market; and even red-deer venison, if asked for, may be had for a price. There is no great mystery in the staple commodity of our sports. Something, it is true, may still be said with effect regarding deer-stalking—a branch of the art venatory which few have the opportunity to study, and of those few a small fraction only can attain to a high degree. Grouse are to be found on every hill, black-game in almost every correi; few are the woods, at the present day, unhaunted by the roe; but the red-deer—the stag of ten—he of the branches and the tines—is, in most parts of the country save in the great forests, a casual and a wandering visitor; and many a summer's day you may clamber over cairn and crag, inspect every scaur and glen, and sweep the horizon around with your telescope, without discovering the waving of an antler, or the impress of a transitory footprint. But this subject is soon exhausted. Scrope has done ample justice to it, and left but a small field untrodden to any literary successor. The Penny Magazine, if we mistake not, disposed several years ago of otter-hunting, and the chase of the fox as practised in the rocky regions; and finally, Colquhoun—he of the Moor and the Loch—with more practical knowledge and acute observation than any of his predecessors, reduced Highland sporting to a science, and became the Encyclopedist of the feræ naturæ of the hills. With these authorities already before us, it was not unnatural that we should have entertained doubts as to the capabilities of any new writer, not native nor to the custom born.
Neither did the puff preliminary, which heralded the appearance of this volume, prepossess us strongly in its favour. What mattered it to the sensible reader whether or no "the attention of the public has already been called to this journal by the Quarterly Review of December 1845?" The book was not published, had not an existence, until seven or eight months after that article—a reasonably indifferent one, by the way—was penned; and yet we are asked to take that sort of pre-Adamite notice as a verdict in its favour! Now, we object altogether to this species of side-winded commendation, this reviewing, or noticing, or extracting from manuscripts before publication, more especially in the pages of a great and influential Review. It is always injudicious, because it looks like the work of a coterie. In the present case it was doubly unwise, because this volume really required no adventitious aid whatever, and certainly no artifice, to recommend it to the public favour.
Whilst, however, we consider it our duty to say thus much, let it not be supposed that we are detracting from the merits of the extracts contained in that article of the Quarterly. On the contrary, they impressed us at the time with a high idea of the graphic power of the writer, and presented an agreeable contrast to the general prolixity of the paper. It is even possible that we are inclined to underrate the efforts of the critic on account of his having forestalled us by printing The Muckle Hart of Benmore—a chapter which we should otherwise have certainly enshrined within the columns of Maga.—At all events it is now full time that we should address ourselves more seriously to the contents of the volume.
Mr St John, we are delighted to observe, is not a sportsman belonging to either class which we have above attempted to describe. He is not the man whose exploits will be selected to swell the lists of slaughtered game in the pages of the provincial newspapers; for he has the eye and the heart of a naturalist, and, as he tells us himself, after a pleasant description of the wild animals which he has succeeded in domesticating—"though naturally all men are carnivorous, and, therefore, animals of prey, and inclined by nature to hunt and destroy other creatures, and, although I share in this our natural instinct to a great extent, I have far more pleasure in seeing these different animals enjoying themselves about me, and in observing their different habits, than I have in hunting down and destroying them."
Most devoutly do we wish that there were many more sportsmen of the same stamp! For ourselves, we confess to an organ of destructiveness not of the minimum degree. We never pass a pool, and hear the sullen plunge of the salmon, without a bitter imprecation upon our evil destiny if we chance to have forgotten our rod; and a covey rising around us, when unarmed, is a plea for suicide. But this feeling, as Mr St John very properly expresses it, is mere natural instinct—part of our original Adam, which it is utterly impossible to subdue. But give us rod or gun. Let us rise and strike some three or four fresh-run fish, at intervals of half-an-hour—let us play, land, and deposit them on the bank, in all the glory of their glittering scales, and it is a hundred to one if we shall be tempted to try another cast, although the cruives are open, the water in rarest trim, and several hours must elapse ere the advent of the cock-a-leekie. In like manner, we prefer a moor where the game is sparse and wild, to one from which the birds are rising at every twenty yards; nor care we ever to slaughter more than may suffice for our own wants and those of our immediate friends. And why should we? There is something not only despicable, but, in our opinion, absolutely brutal, in the accounts which we sometimes read of wholesale massacres committed on the moors, in sheer wanton lust for blood. Fancy a great hulking Saxon, attended by some half-dozen gamekeepers, with a larger retinue of gillies, sallying forth at early morning upon ground where the grouse are lying as thick and tame as chickens in a poultry-yard—loosing four or five dogs at a time, each of which has found his bird or his covey before he has been freed two minutes from the couples—marching up in succession to each stationary quadruped—kicking up the unfortunate pouts, scarce half-grown, from the heather before his feet—banging right and left into the middle of them, and—for the butcher shoots well—bringing down one, and sometimes two, at each discharge. The red-whiskered keeper behind him, who narrowly escaped transportation, a few years ago, for a bloody and ferocious assault, hands him another gun, ready-loaded; and so on he goes, for hour after hour, depopulating God's creatures, of every species, without mercy, until his shoulder is blue with the recoil, and his brow black as Cain's, with the stain of the powder left, as he wipes away the sweat with his stiff and discoloured hand. At evening, the pyramid is counted, and lo, there are two hundred brace!
Is this sporting, or is it murder? Not the first certainly, unless the term can be appropriately applied to the hideous work of the shambles. Indeed, between knocking down stots or grouse in this wholesale manner, we can see very little distinction; except that, in the one case, there is more exertion of the muscles, and in the other a clearer atmosphere to nerve the operator to his task. Murder is a strong term, so we shall not venture to apply it; but cruelty is a word which we may use without compunction; and from that charge, at least, it is impossible for the glutton of the moors to go free.