—the first branch from the beam in the head of a stag.
BUCK
—the male of the fallow deer. In his first year he is called a fawn; he is then a pricket; and lastly A BUCK. In colour they are mottled, sandy, or a deep dingy brown, approaching to black. The males have horns; the does none. Buck venison is very superior to doe; and when well fatted, sells from three to four guineas each haunch. The season for it in the highest perfection is from June to September.
Buck hunting—has been of late years but little practised, very few of them affording chase enough to render it a matter of much sporting attraction; particularly if bred in a park, whence, from its being so much accustomed to the sight of the human frame, it becomes in some degree like a kind of domestic animal. They were much hunted by the late and great (Culloden) Duke of Cumberland; but with his hounds (called buck hounds) he drew for and roused his outlying deer in Cranbourne Chace, near Windsor Great Park. When found in this way, they frequently went away well across the country, and sometimes afforded tolerable sport. The bucks shed their horns (called heads) annually in April or May, which, with the skins of both bucks and does killed within the year, (if a park is large,) make no inconsiderable perquisite to the keeper.
BULL DOG
.—A bull dog, though inoffensive and harmless when properly domesticated, forms, to the eye of timidity, a most terrific appearance: the doubtful and designing leer of the eye, the tiger-like shortness of the head, the under-hung jaw, the wideness of the forehead, the width of the skull, the distension of the nostrils, and the almost constant sight of the teeth, hold forth a very emphatic specimen of the power they possess, when that power is angrily brought into action. The breed is by no means so numerous as formerly, in consequence of the gradual decline of bull-baiting, and the great number taken abroad, for many of which very great prices were obtained. The natural ferocity, strength, and thirst for blood, in this animal, rendered them a formidable nuisance in their unrestrained state, and they are now seldom seen at their full liberty, either in town or country; the owners, from a proper fear of the law, finding it more prudent to keep them properly confined.
BULL-BAITING
—was formerly not merely a pleasing pursuit, but an extatic diversion, of the most unfeeling, and least humane, part of the very lowest, and most abandoned, orders of the people. To such a pitch of prevalence had it arrived in some particular parts, and was so much considered to give additional callosity to the minds of its cruel and inconsiderate abettors, that the more polished and humane classes of society made strong and repeated efforts for its total abolition, by endeavouring to obtain an act of the Legislature for that purpose; which, however, unluckily failed of the intentional effect; for the bill being rejected by a very trifling majority in the House of Commons, it left the sport at the full liberty of every subject to enjoy, who is not restrained by any more humane, sublime and manly sensations of his own, prompting him to believe it "more honoured in the breach than the observance." The towns of Stamford, in Lincolnshire, and Wokingham, in Berkshire, are now, perhaps, the only places of any note where the sport (as it is called) is obstinately persevered in, or enthusiastically and annually repeated by the clamours of those unfeeling advocates for custom, who, in the language of Shylock, claim "it as a right, and will not be deprived of it."
The first bull-bait in this country is supposed to have been at Stamford, in the year 1209, in the reign of King John, and at Tutbury, Staffordshire, in 1374. The introduction of it at Stamford was as follows.
"William, Earl Warren, Lord of this town, standing upon the walls of the castle, saw two bulls fighting for a cow in the castle meadow, till all the butchers' dogs pursued one of the bulls (madded with noise and multitude) clean through the town. This sight so pleased the Earl, that he gave the castle meadow, where the bull's duel began, for a common to the butchers of the town, after the first grass was mowed, on condition that they should find a mad bull, the day six weeks before Christmas-day, for the continuance of that sport for ever."