Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

shall only reiterate our opinion that the alleged injury to the interests of agriculture is entirely fallacious, and that the deer forests of Scotland are really only suitable for the purpose to which they are applied.

The art of deer-stalking formed the subject of an interesting volume which was reviewed some years since in this Journal;* we need not therefore enter into details relating to it. It is an exercise which brings every energy of mind and body into activity, for the wild stag displays an ingenuity in evading his enemies that ranks him among the most sagacious of creatures. He manœuvres with consummate skill to circumvent his antagonist, and all his movements prove him to be possessed of a quickness of perception and a promptitude of decision that a strategist might envy. In the excitement of the chase, his self-possession never deserts him. The first object of an old hart when roused from his lair is to find a substitute. For that purpose he beats the coverts until he has discovered a stag younger and therefore fleeter than himself to personate him in the impending chase. On having found one, either by a stamp of his foot or a decisive application of his antlers, he rouses him from his bed, of which he takes possession, lying down in it with his nose to the ground. An old stag has been known in the course of a single chase to turn three different deer out of their lairs. The trick is well known to sportsmen, and is not therefore often successful; for, as soon as it is discovered, the hounds are drawn off from the false pursuit and led back to the scent of the original stag, who is driven from his hiding-place and compelled to run for his life. There is another use which an old hart often makes of the younger stags which shows considerable cunning. He may be often seen in the rutting season in company with two or three striplings of his own sex whom he apparently condescends to patronise, but he uses them merely as decoys to bring the young hinds into his presence without the trouble of searching for them. Stationing himself on the brink of a stream or under the shade of some wide-spreading oak, whither he knows that the hinds, heated and wearied by the importunities of their young gallants, will probably betake themselves, he waits their approach, but no sooner does the troop appear than he rushes upon the young stags and puts them to instant flight, and they scarcely dare again to cast even from a

*The Art of Deer Stalking,' by W. Scrope, Esq. See 'Quarterly Review,' No. 126.

The late Lord Lyndoch is said to have declared that he owed much of his skill in choosing ground in the Peninsular war, to his early practice of deerstalking.

distance

distance a furtive glance at the old monarch disporting himself amidst his sylvan harem.

6

Another, and often a more successful mode of baffling his enemies, is for a stag to take soil,' in other words, to sink himself in a pool or river, keeping his nostrils or but a small portion of his head above the water. He is thus invisible to his pursuers except to one of the keenest eye, the scent is lost, and he will often remain concealed in this way for hours until the danger has passed away.

No creature is endowed with a more invincible courage than the red stag. Shakespeare has a noble allusion to this high quality in his play of Henry VI.':—

'If we be English deer be then in blood,

Not rascall like to fall down with a pinch,
But rather moody-mad and desperate stags,
Turn on the bloody hounds with heads of steel,
And make the cowards stand aloof at bay.'

The bearing of the stag when brought to bay is noble in the extreme. It is impossible to detect any trace of fear in his clear, bold, and thoughtful eye, and woe to any gallant hound that rashly ventures within the sweep of his terrible antlers. The combats of red stags with each other in the rutting season are frightful, and they often fight to the death. Fallow bucks are as brave in their battles as stags, and the clatter of their broad antlers while engaged in conflict may be often heard within the park palings, but from the formation of their horns the duels which take place between them are not so often followed by fatal results, although there are instances of bucks having fought until one has fallen, and they have been found with their antlers so inextricably locked together that they could be separated only by a saw.

of

Deer parks are peculiar to England; nothing resembling them exists in any other part of Europe. With their sleek dappled bodies, graceful forms, and gentle, expressive countenances fallow deer are most pleasing objects; and a group fine bucks reposing on a sultry summer's day under the shade of some venerable oak, presents a picture with its accessories and associations such as England alone can produce. Mr. Shirley has collected, with the most praiseworthy industry, whatever is remarkable in the history of these pleasant spots. His book is replete with curious antiquarian information and throws

The term rascall' was used by our ancestors to denote a deer fit neither to be hunted nor killed, and was no doubt thence adopted into the vocabulary of vituperation.

2 c2

considerable

considerable light upon the diversions of our ancestors. All the existing deer parks in England and Wales are noticed, and their dimensions, and, as far as possible, the number of their deer, are carefully given. Many interesting details will also be found relating to ancient parks, the traditions of which alone remain but which are inseparably connected with great historical names and with periods that must ever be regarded as not the least interesting in the history of the country.

ART. IV.-Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury. By Walter Farquhar Hook, D.D., F.R.S., Dean of Chichester. Vols. VI. and VII. New Series. Reformation Period. 2 vols. London,

1868. By Samuel Wilberforce.

SIN

(INCE the Dean of Chichester's 'Lives of the Archbishops' Were first noticed in these pages, the work has advanced to the goodly number of seven volumes, the last continuing the history till the death of Archbishop Cranmer. The two last volumes, beginning with the archiepiscopate of Warham, and ending with the death of Cranmer, contain the records of the great crisis of the English Reformation. The work has from the first steadily increased in interest. Not only has the Dean's hand become readier in the performance of its task, but the subjects of his pen have been connected with greater national events, and far richer original matter has been open to his examination. The battles of the Kites and Crows have passed on through the demigod period, and become the contentions of men in circumstances somewhat like our own, and with objects at least analogous to those for which we are striving.

This new interest rises to its height in these last two volumes. The Reformation period must always rivet the attention of Englishmen. For then, whatever evils were inseparable from it, was the birth-time of their liberties both in Church and State. Its long sufferings were but travail pangs, and though many of the attendant operations were rudely managed, with no little loss of vital energy and threatenings of still greater evils, yet was the birth at last gracious, and on those who were the instruments of its accomplishment must always rest with the deepest interest the enquiring gaze of after generations.

Never, perhaps, was this more the case than at the present time, when we are passing again through many struggles both of religious thought and of national policy not unlike those with which our fathers grappled. For the great questions which

stirred

stirred so deeply the souls of our Reformers, that they were ready to burn and to be burnt at a thousand stakes to procure their settlement, seem, after a torpor of three hundred years, to have suddenly reawoke amongst us, and we have almost each one of us again to examine the Pope's claim to supremacy and infallibility with all the train of teaching which is involved in such an admission :—the necessity of auricular confession; the celibacy of the clergy; the maiming, for the laity, of the great Sacrament of the Eucharist; the cultus of the blessed Virgin Mary; the offering of masses for the quick and dead ; and purgatory with its pains, its indulgences, and its corresponding pecuniary advantages. Questions of public policy, too, which were then in course of settlement, and the settlement of which has been thenceforward interwoven with the very warp of our national life, are all suddenly re-opened. The existence of a Church really national-the only bulwark as our fathers believed, and as our children may find to their cost, against the arrogance and the usurpations of Rome-is suddenly threatened. For if England and Ireland be one united kingdom, with one Established Church, and not two separate monarchies loosely allied by the overshadowing of two Crowns Imperial resting for the time upon one brow, the destruction of the Church's nationality in one island must logically imply its destruction as a national Church in both, although it may still survive as an anomaly To build this up which it is now so lightly proposed to pull down, was, in fact, the master aim of the great Reformation statesmen. Thus, in the grand old English of the Statute of Appeals, it was declared that:

in one.

'By divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it is manifestly declared and exposited that this realm of England is an empire and hath so been accepted in the world; governed by one supreme head and king, having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown of the same; unto whom a body politic compact of all sorts and degrees of people, divided in terms by names of spiritualty and temporalty, be bound, and ought to bear next to God a natural and humble obedience. the body spiritual whereof having power when any cause of the law divine happened to come in question, or of spiritual, having declared, interpret, and shewed by that part of the body politic called the spiritualty, now usually called the English Church, which also hath been reported and also found of that sort, that both for knowledge, integrity and sufficiency of numbers it hath been always thought to be, and is also at this hour, sufficient and meet of itself without the interfering of any exterior person or persons, to declare and determine all such doubts, and to administer all such offices and duties as to their room spiritual doth appertain.'

It

It was on this foundation of the unquestioned existence of a national Church of the empire, as a body spiritual, that the usurped claim of the Bishop of Rome to interfere with this kingdom was by enactment fully and for ever excluded, and all attempts to re-introduce his jurisdiction was branded with the guilt of treason against the high reserved nationality of the realm which centered in the Crown of England. How well that bulwark was conceived, how straight its lines were devised and drawn across the main stream and flow of Papal aggression, how deeply laid were its foundations, how well compacted were its stones, has been shown beyond the possibility of question by all succeeding events by its standing, under Henry VIII, and Edward VI., the first buffet of those proud waves, by its speedy restoration from the demolition attempted under Philip and Mary, and by its continuance from Elizabeth to Victoria as the very breakwater of our nationality against whatever storms have burst from time to time upon us from the dark and turbulent depths of that spiritual Black Sea, which has never ceased to rage against our borders. This it is now proposed to raze, because its existence proclaiming of necessity the incorporation of Ireland with Great Britain is a standing insult to those who are thus reminded that they are no longer what their fathers were, an independent kingdom, entitled to an independent spiritualty. When such proposals are made, there must, for all thoughtful men, be a peculiar interest in studying anew the history of that time when these defences were erected. Then, too, it must be the course of wisdom to see why our forefathers toiled so hard to raise them, and what may be our condition when we have agreed to their demolition.

It may be presumed that it would be by alleging the exceeding importance of the era described in these two volumes that the publisher (for it is not credible that their respected author had anything to do with it) has called them a new series.' But the idea of a 'new series' is really at variance with the whole aim and purpose of these volumes and of every line in them from their first beginning. For one leading object of the Dean has evidently been to show the unbrokenness of this Church of England from the beginning until now; to exhibit it one and the same body from the mission of Augustine to the present hour; to show it protesting against the rising aggressions of Rome under the Plantagenets, and completing and enforcing the protest with the brave hearts and strong hands of the Tudor kings.

[ocr errors]

'When we speak,' he says, ' of the continuity and perpetuity of the English

« ZurückWeiter »