Page:Out-door Games Cricket and Golf (1901).djvu/16

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INTRODUCTORY

We have all of us seen in late years a multiplication of handbooks on hunting, shooting, and all forms of fishing, and games, both outdoor and indoor. Hunting especially has been the means of bringing into existence works that are classics. Beckford, Surtees, and Whyte-Melville are three great names, and the sport of hunting has been brought before our eyes by means of novel, treatise, and poetry. In Whyte-Melville's "Market Harborough" the author remarks, in discussing the redoubtable Crasher, that the love of hunting breeds a poetical instinct in its devotee, and the man who goes well across country frequently has a spirit of poetry in him, and we can well understand that this is the case. The wild excitement, the open air, and most of all the pace,