RECREATIONS OF CHRISTOPHER NORTH. CHRISTOPHER IN HIS SPORTING JACKET. FYTTE FIRST. Phrenology sets the question for ever at rest. All people have thirty-three faculties. Now there are but twenty-four letters in the alphabet; yet how many languages-some six-thou sand we believe, each of which is susceptible of many dialects! No wonder, then, that you might as well try to count all the sands on the sea-shore as all the species of sportsmen. human character, pray what is there at all surprising in your being madly fond of shootingand your brother Tom just as foolish about THERE is a fine and beautiful alliance between fishing-and cousin Jack perfectly insane on all pastimes pursued on flood, field, and fell. fox-hunting-while the old gentleman your fa The principles in human nature on which they ther, in spite of wind and weather, perennial depend, are in all the same; but those princi- gout, and annual apoplexy, goes a-coursing of ples are subject to infinite modifications and the white-hipped hare on the bleak Yorkshire varieties, according to the difference of indi-wolds-and uncle Ben, as if just escaped from vidual and national character. All such pas- Bedlam or St. Luke's, with Dr. Haslam at his times, whether followed merely as pastimes, heels, or with a few hundred yards' start of or as professions, or as the immediate means Dr. Warburton, is seen galloping, in a Welsh of sustaining life, require sense, sagacity, and wig and strange apparel, in the rear of a pack knowledge of nature and nature's laws; nor of Lilliputian beagles, all barking as if they less, patience, perseverance, courage even, and were as mad as their master, supposed to be bodily strength or activity, while the spirit in chase of an invisible animal that keeps which animates and supports them is a spirit eternally doubling in field and forest-"still of anxiety, doubt, fear, hope, joy, exultation, hoped for, never seen," and well christened and triumph-in the heart of the young a by the name of Escape? fierce passion-in the heart of the old a passion still, but subdued and tamed down, without, however, being much dulled or deadened, by various experience of all the mysteries of the calling, and by the gradual subsiding of all impetuous impulses in the frames of all mortal men beyond perhaps threescore, when the blackest head will be becoming gray, the most nervous knee less firmly knit, the most steely-springed instep less elastic, the keenest eye less of a far-keeker, and, above all, the most boiling heart less like a caldron or a crater-yea, the whole man subject to some dimness or decay, and, consequently, the whole duty of man like the new edition of a book, from which many passages that formed the chief glory of the editio princeps have been expunged the whole character of the style corrected without being thereby improved-just ike the later editions of the Pleasures of Imagination, which were written by Akenside when he was about twenty-one, and altered by him at forty-to the exclusion or destruction of many most splendida vitia, by which process the poem, in our humble opinion, was shorn of its brightest beams, and suffered disastrous twilight and eclipse-perplexing critics. Now, seeing that such pastimes are in number almost infinite, and infinite the varieties of There is, therefore, nothing to prevent any man with a large and sound development from excelling, at once, in rat-catching and deer-stalking-from being, in short, a universal genius in sports and pastimes. Heaven has made us such a man. Yet there seems to be a natural course or progress in pastimes. We do not now speak of marbles-or knuckling down at taw-or trundling a hoop-or pall-lall-or pitch and toss-or any other of the games of the school playground. We restrict ourselves to what, somewhat inaccurately perhaps, are called field-sports. Thus angling seems the earliest of them all in the order of nature. There the new-breeched urchin stands on the low bridge of the little bit burnie! and with crooked pin, baited with one unwrithing ring of a dead worm, and attached to a yarn-thread-for he has not yet got into hair, and is years off gut-his tod of the mere willow or hazel wand, there will ▲ 2 5 |