Any unqualified person exposing a HARE, PHEASANT, PARTRIDGE, or other game, to sale, is liable to a penalty of 5l. For selling a HARE, PHEASANT, PARTRIDGE, or other game, qualified or unqualified, 5l. If either are found in the shop, house, or possession of any POULTERER, SALESMAN, FISHMONGER, COOK or PASTRY-COOK, or of any person not qualified in his own right to KILL GAME, or entitled thereto under some person so qualified, it shall be deemed an exposing thereof to sale.
Unqualified persons using any engine to kill or destroy HARES, PHEASANTS, PARTRIDGES, or other game, liable to a penalty of 5l. as well as keeping and using GREYHOUNDS, SETTING DOGS, or any engines to kill or destroy HARES, PHEASANTS, PARTRIDGES, or other game, are liable to a penalty of 5l. The keeping or using being individually or jointly liable to the forfeiture of 5l. as well as for killing, so it should appear, from the plain construction of the Acts, that if the informations are separately laid, first for "keeping and using," and secondly "for KILLING," conviction must inevitably follow for both, if sufficient evidence is produced to confirm the offence. Informations must be laid within SIX CALENDAR MONTHS, before a Justice of Peace, or by action of debt, bill, plaint, or information. The whole penalty to be given to the informer, with double costs, if brought on in Westminster Hall. Summary conviction, half to the informer, and half to the poor. These are the penalties annexed to former Acts, independent of the Act respecting annual certificates to be taken out from the Clerk of the Peace, to KILL (or go in pursuit of) GAME; without which, incurs an additional penalty of 20l. to the unqualified, making the forfeiture 25l. and of 20l. to the QUALIFIED, who becomes only liable to that single penalty, for killing, or attempting to kill, game without the annual certificate so prescribed to be taken out.
A QUALIFIED PERSON cannot come upon another man's ground to KILL GAME, without being liable to an ACTION for trespass; and an unqualified person for trespassing, shall pay full costs: but if a person qualified to kill game, sustains an ACTION for trespass, and the damage shall be found under 40s. he shall in such case pay no more COSTS than DAMAGES; this being a most equitable construction, to prevent paltry and personal litigations. It has been decided by the highest legal authority, that any unqualified person may go out to beat hedges, bushes, and mark birds, in company with any qualified person, to see the game pursued and taken, without being liable to any penalty, provided he has no DOG, GUN, or ENGINE, of his own, individually, to assist in its destruction.
It would be unfair to conclude this subject, which has for centuries occasioned such a diversity of opinions amongst the SUPERIOR CLASSES, and diffused so much discontent amongst the lower, without submitting to both, a very EMPHATIC and literal extract from Judge Blackstone, in his comment upon the Forest Laws, in which he has this particular passage.
"From a simple principle, to which, though the Forest Laws are now mitigated, and by degrees grown entirely obsolete, yet, from this root has sprung a bastard-slip, known by the name of the Game Laws, now arrived to, and wantoning in, its highest vigour; both founded upon the same unreasonable notions of permanent property in wild creatures, and productive of the same tyranny; but with this difference, that the Forest Laws established only one MIGHTY HUNTER throughout the land; the Game Laws have raised a little Nimrod in every manor."
GAMES of ART
—are those in which the skill, judgment, and penetration of the player are immediately concerned, and upon which alone his success must entirely depend. In this class are included Billiards, Chess, Draughts, Cricket, Fives, Tennis, Bowls, and some others, as well as a few upon the Cards; but as the latter are always subject to DECEPTION, and completely subservient to the slipping, sliding, and cutting of the most FAMILIAR FRIENDS, (even in private families,) they are, with propriety, much more entitled to the appellation of CHANCE than of ART, particularly where the unsuspecting player has the perpetual chance of being ROBBED, without the mortification of knowing the main-spring of depredation. However expert those may be, who indulge and excel in GAMES of ART, two things should ever be predominant in memory; always to play with an invariable philosophic PATIENCE and SERENITY, never to seem affected by a temporary run of ill-luck or momentary advantage, any more than agitated by the exulting irritation of a successful opponent. The run on one side may as suddenly be reversed to the other; a chance that petulance and ill-humour may probably destroy. Prudent players never engage in matches of any kind where four or more are concerned, except amongst their most intimate acquaintance; particularly at the public tables of the Metropolis, where it is the custom for three to poll one, and divide the spoils after the PIDGEON has been plucked; a very fashionable mode of playing at both BILLIARDS and WHIST; by which an infinity of necessitous and unprincipled adventurers procure a daily subsistence.
GAMES of CHANCE
.—Those games are so called, which depend solely upon the turning up of a CARD, or the uncertain "HAZARD of THE DIE." When fairly played, without any latent deception on one side or the other, they are considered truly equitable between the players, who are then said "to PLAY UPON THE SQUARE," without a point of advantage, the whole being dependent upon, and decided by, the EFFECT of CHANCE. The celebrated nocturnal game of Hazard, at which such immense property is annually LOST and WON, at the most fashionable and powerfully-supported GAMING HOUSES, is known to be the first and fairest GAME of CHANCE, upon which an adventurer (determined to encounter the probability of ruin) can possibly venture to STAKE HIS MONEY: on the contrary, it must be admitted, that the torrent of villainy, and unprincipled prostitution of affected integrity, have made such rapid and unprecedented strides to perfection, that the most experienced SPORTSMEN must despair of being enabled to play upon the square, after so many GAMBLERS of FASHION have, within a few years, been detected with loaded dice in their possession.
The game of E O, so plausibly deluding to all classes, particularly to rustics upon the different country COURSES and RACE GROUNDS, is the most deceptive, and most destructive, of any ever yet displayed for the purpose of public attraction; it may be very candidly placed in a parallel line with those low and rascally inventions of HUSTLING in the HAT, and PRICKING in the BELT, to both which an infinity of cunning countrymen become infatuated dupes, to the great emolument and gratification of that horde of miscreants, who subsist only upon the credulity and ignorance of the inexperienced, avaricious, and unsuspecting.