monkeys a sound shaking, and liberate the victim. But he will not be persuaded that it is just as cruel wantonly to hunt a hare or a deer as a dog; perhaps more so, for the dog could be the most formidable enemy of the three. The word " game" is a spell which perverts all his thoughts, paralyses all his sympathies. He has no pity for game. It was intended to be hunted, to be run down. He would not kill a cat-a cat is not game. Were you to ask such a man if he liked pulling out the legs and wings of flies at a window, he would be very much shocked at the question. Yet a fly is not a more utterly defenceless creature before a man's fingers, than a partridge or a pheasant is before a man's gun. Were you to ask him how he would relish shooting down live fowls in the hen-coops in Leadenhall-market, he would be grievously offended. Yet pheasants are sometimes almost as tame as barn-door chicks. We have stood in the preserves of a noble duke in a midland county of England, where we could have knocked down pheasants with our stick, certainly as easily as we could have fractured the skulls of cocks and hens in a barn-yard. A great battue was shortly to take place in this huge game-coop. It might just as well have taken place in a poulterer's shop, just as great dexterity and celerity would be required for the slaughtering process in the one place as in the other. However, it seems that shooting tame pheasants in a battue is gentlemanly, and that wringing the necks of poultry in a market is unpleasant and vulgar. A very great distinction, with a very little difference!

If a man attacks an animal stronger and fiercer than himself— we must, at all events, allow him the qualification of intrepidityyour hunter of tigers is a more terrible fellow by far than your mere courser of hares. But if he be the greater Nimrod, he has to pay the greater price for his credit-he may very well like the sport of hunting a tiger, but have no inclination for the sport of the tiger hunting him. The exterminator of hares-as he does not play so deeply-can never suffer so severely. The tigerslayer may look down upon the hare-slayer, as a fellow who has broken into the Bank may sneer at a companion in trouble who only picked pockets. The Bank-breaker may well pity a poor creature whose unambitious soul soars not above the low level of petty larceny; but there is rich comfort for the small thief, in the consideration of the relative inconveniences of a life in Norfolk Island and three months on the treadmill at Brixton. "What foolhardiness is it," may exclaim the votary of sporting petty

larceny, "to think of attacking an animal which may turn and injure you so seriously!" "What cowardice it is," may retort the votary of sporting felony on a large scale, "to think of attacking an animal which can do neither the one or the other!" And, in our opinion, either will have the other very fairly.

This then is what sporting is. We believe we have painted it fairly: Let it be proved that the animals are killed for use, and merely for use, and that the least cruel mode is adopted of killing them, and we retract all we have said. We do not object to butchers, but to sportsmen-not to shambles, but to preserves. We cast our eyes back, and we see cruelties, long considered as forming the very essence of English sport, given up and reprobated on all hands. Fox-hunting and battue shooting are national games now. Bull-baiting and dog-fighting were so once. But the day of the one has past away, and we do not see why that of the other should not follow it. If unthinking cruelty be leaving us, we trust it will leave us entirely, that not even the black shadow of its wings shall remain behind!

The day that sees the abolition of the Game Laws will see a triumph of common sense, common honesty, common humanity. It is a melancholy thing to cast the eye over rural newspapers and see the long columns devoted to reports of the convictions of halfstarved men who have offended our modern forest laws. Legislate as you please, preach as you please, argue as you please, and you will never convince the common sense of either learned men or ignorant men, that killing a pheasant is a crime like stealing a sheep. But if poaching be not within the circle of moral crime, it is an easy stepping-stone to all crime. The malum prohibitum speedily brings on the malum in se. The man who makes his first entry into the county jail as a poacher, will probably make his next as a thief. The midnight slaughter of game leads to the midnight slaughter of game-keepers. Theft and murder end the drama begun by poaching.

And all this complicated career of crime is wrought, because one man is not allowed to kill to satisfy his hunger, a somethingwhich is not property-which another man is allowed to kill to satisfy a wanton pleasure. Let this be reformed altogether. Let this, one of the greatest anomalies, one of the foulest sores in our social system, be burnt out of it. Declare that the wild things of the earth were made for all men, not for a few men and for all men to consume, not for any wantonly to destroy.

A. B. R.

THE DRUM.

YONDER is a little drum
Hanging on the wall,

Dusty wreaths and tatter'd flags
Round about it fall.

A Shepherd youth on Cheviot's hills
Watch'd the sheep whose skin
A cunning workman wrought and gave
The little drum its din.

O pleasant are fair Cheviot's hills
With velvet verdure spread,
And pleasant 'tis amid its heath
To make your summer bed.

And sweet and clear are Cheviot's rills
That trickle to its vales,

And balmily its tiny flowers

Breathe on the passing gales.

And thus hath felt the Shepherd boy Whilst tending of his fold,

Nor thought there was in all the world A spot like Cheviot's wold.

And so it was for many a day,

But change with Time will come, And he (Alas! for him the day!) He heard the little drum.

"Follow," said the drummer-boy,
"Would you live in story;
"For he who strikes a foeman down,
"Wins a wreath of glory!"

"Rub-a-dub and rub-a-dub,"
The drummer beats away-
The Shepherd let his bleating flock
On Cheviot wildly stray.

On Egypt's arid waste of sand
The Shepherd now is lying,
Around him many a parching tongue
For water 's faintly crying.

O that he were on Cheviot's hills
With velvet verdure spread,
Or lying 'mid the blooming heath,
Where oft he'd made his bed.

Or could he drink of those sweet rills
That trickle to the vales,

Or breathe once more the balminess
Of Cheviot's mountain gales.

At length upon his wearied eyes
The mists of slumber come,
And he is in his home again-
Till waken'd by the drum.

"Take arms! Take arms," his leader cries,
"The hated foeman's nigh;
Guns loudly roar-steel clanks on steel,
And thousands fall to die.

The Shepherd's blood makes red the sand,
"Oh! water-give me some!
"My voice might reach a friendly ear,
"But for that little drum!"

'Mid moaning men-'mid dying men,
The drummer kept his way,
And many a one, by "glory" lured,
Did curse the drum that day.
"Rub-a-dub and rub-a-dub,"
The drummer beat aloud-
The Shepherd died, and ere the morn,
The hot sand was his shroud.

And this is glory? Yes; and still
Will man the tempter follow,
Nor learn that glory, like its drum,
Is but a sound and hollow.

PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF THE LATE
WILLIAM HAZLITT.

BY P. G. PATMORE.

No. 2.

HAZLITT'S PERSONAL APPEARANCE-HIS HABITS OF LIFE-HIS MODES OF

COMPOSITION.

HAZLITT is considered by some of his friends to have had many points of intellectual character and temperament in common with Rousseau. But I do not know how they would set about to make out the resemblance, except in one isolated feature that of the morbid feeling which possessed Hazlitt, as to the sinister effect of his personal appearance and manner, on ordinary observers. Rousseau fancied that his friends were always hatching plots and conspiracies against him: in like manner, Hazlitt fancied that everybody (except his friends) who looked upon him, perceived something about him that was strange and outré.

There was about as much and as little foundation for the feeling in the one case as the other: it was in fact the result of a consciousness in both that there was something within, which each would have desired to conceal: but there was this vital difference between the two—that in the case of Rousseau, the weaknesses and errors of which he feared the discovery and promulgation, were such as all men consent to be ashamed of; whereas in the case of Hazlitt, his extreme sensitiveness pointed at failings that could hurt nobody but himself: moreover, what he chiefly feared from the eyes of the world was, that they would see in him, not what he was, but what the lies and libels of his political and personal enemies had proclaimed him to be. He feared that vulgar eyes would discover in him, not the man he was, but the "pimpled Hazlitt" that Blackwood had placarded him on every bare wall that knew no better throughout the empire.

There are few things that exercise a more marked and unequivocal influence on the lives and characters of men of great susceptibility of temperament, than any personal peculiarity, especially when it is one obvious to all the world: witness the case of Byron,