tion to his studies, he minded nothing but hunting, hawking, tilting, cards, dice, tennis, and other diversions of youth." "Yet on the day appointed he met with them in the College of Navarre, and acquit himself beyond expression in that dispute, which lasted from nine till six of the clock." But still, after all this hard work," he was so little fatigued with that day's dispute that the very next day he went to the Louvre, where he had a match of tilting, an exercise in great request in those days; and in the presence of some princes of the Court of France, and a great many ladies, he carried away the ring fifteen times on end, and broke as many lances on the Saracen." No wonder that "ever after that he was called the Admirable Crichton!" When King James's brother-in-law, Christian of Denmark, was in England in 1606, the recorder of his "Welcome" then tells us that: "On Monday, being the 4th day of August, it pleased our King's Majestie himself in person, and the King's Majestie of Denmark, likewise in person, and divers others of his estate, to runne at the ring in the tilt-yard at Greenwich, where the King of Denmark approved to all judgments that majestie is never unaccompanied with vertue; for there, in the presence of all the beholders, he tooke the ring fower severall times, and would, I thinke, have done the like four score times, had he runne so many courses." Echard, in his "History of England," says that Charles the First was "so perfect in vaulting, riding the great horse, running at the ring, shooting with crossbows, muskets, and sometimes great guns, that if sovereignty had been the reward of excellence in those arts, he would have acquired a new title to the crown, being accounted the most celebrated marksman and the most perfect manager of the great horse of any in the three kingdoms." Gross flattery this probably was; but many other passages might be cited to prove the fondness of the age for this and similar pastimes, by which, Burton tells us, "many gentlemen gallop quite out of their fortunes." Both the quintain-" common recreation of country folk," and the ring-"disport of greater men," according to the "Anatomy of Melancholy "-appear to have gone out with the Stuarts in England, though in Scotland traces of tilting at the ring are found now and then in notices of country fairs and gatherings during the last century. A curious instance of this, where the pastime was cultivated as a preventive to intemperance that should endear it to Sir Wilfrid Lawson, is given in Sir John Sinclair's "Statistical Account of Scotland in 1798." An old Perthshire Society, the Fraternity of Chapmen, held their annual meeting for the election of their "Lord," or president, in the parish of Dunkeld. After the election the members dined together, and, after dinner, the minister of the parish tells us, "to prevent that intemperance to which social meetings in such situations are sometimes prone, they spend the evening in some public competition of dexterity or skill. Of these, riding at the ring (an amusement of ancient and warlike origin) is the chief. Two perpendicular posts are erected on this occasion, with a cross beam, from which is suspended a small ring; the competitors are on horseback, each having a pointed rod in his hand, and he who at full gallop, passing betwixt the posts, carries away the ring on his rod, gains the prize." In recent years running at the ring has again become. popular, especially at "military sports," where the pastime, along with tent-pegging, its brother sport from the East, cultivates quickness of eye and hand, and management of the charger among our cavalry, exactly as the old quintain and ring were designed to do among our ancestors eight centuries ago. 184 CHAPTER XV. COURSING. Yet if for sylvan sports thy bosom glow, GAY, Rural Sports. COURSING with greyhounds, though, as the author of "The Booke of Huntinge," says, "doubtlesse a noble pastime, and as meet for nobility and gentlemen as any of the other kinds of Venerie," probably was a mode of hunting of much more recent origin than that department of the chase in which hounds pursued the game by scent instead of by sight alone. It certainly was so in the classical world. Homer, indeed, has references to a sport very like coursing, as in the "Iliad," where he compares Ulysses and Diomede pursuing Dolon : As when two skilful hounds the leveret wind; or praises in the "Odyssey" the swiftness and keenness of sight and smell of the famous hound" Argus": His eye how piercing, and his scent how true To wind the vapour in the tainted dew. "But we cannot allow such a hound," says a learned translator of Arrian's "Cynegeticus," "within the precincts of a coursing kennel, where speed and keensightedness are the essential properties; to stoop to the tainted green,' with the sagacity of a harrier, invalidates the claim." "Greyhounds," says old Gervase Markham, "are onely for the coursing of all sorts of wilde beasts by main swiftnesse of foot; they doe not anything more than their eyes govern them unto;" and such dogs, we have the authority of the younger Xenophon for saying, were quite unknown in ancient Greece. Ovid is the first classical author who refers to coursing. The accuracy of this description and the correctness of its technical phraseology imply not only that the poet was a practical courser and derived his imagery from experience in the field, but that the sport must have had a systematic form and been governed by a well-established set of rules in Ovid's day. It probably was introduced into the southern parts of the Roman empire some little time before the poet lived, from the country of the Galli or Celts. The northern plains of Europe appear to have been the birthplace of coursing; and the greyhound is generally referred to by Greek and Roman writers as the Gallic dog, the Celtic dog, or as Vertragus, a name that is generally supposed to mean a dog adapted for coursing over plains or open country. Casual allusions to the Vertragus acer in Martial and other authors are all the records of coursing we have till we come to the time of Adrian and the Antonini, when we get a full and perfect picture of the pastime in the elaborate "Cynegeticus" of Arrian of Nicomedia, in Bithynia, "the younger Xenophon," as he calls himself. His object, he tells us, was to supply an omission in the treatise on hunting of the son of Gryllus, who knew nothing of coursing, and accordingly the Bithynian-like Xenophon, "a sportsman, a general, and a philosopher "—enters minutely into all the details of kennel management, the "points" of a properly bred greyhound, and the laws and practise of coursing, in a manner that his best translator and annotator tells us has left "little to be added to our knowledge in any department of coursing." The classical history of the leash may be said to terminate in the fourth century. Long before then, however, we come upon allusions to the existence of greyhounds in our own islands. Nemesian, a Carthaginian writer on the chase in the third century, speaks of these British dogs being exported to Rome; and we know that, in the reign of Theodosius, Flavian sent seven Celtic or Irish dogs-septem Scoticorum canum oblatio-of the greatest speed and fire, to grace the spectacle of his brother Symmachus at Rome. Though Ireland was at that time the country of the Scoti, there is little reason to doubt that similar dogs of the chase were known in what is now Scotland; for, besides the statements in Hector Boece, Fordun, and other old Scottish chroniclers of the high estimation in which greyhounds were held in those early times, we have the more trustworthy evidence of the sculptured stones of the North of Scotland, on many of which are stirring pictures of the chase in which lithe greyhounds are depicted in hot pursuit of their quarry. These invaluable pictures of old manners, which have been made accessible to us by Dr. John Stuart's Spalding Club volumes, have been set down by the best authorities to dates from the third to the ninth centuries. We have evidence of the renhund, or greyhound, being an inmate of Anglo-Saxon kennels as early as the days of Aelfric of Mercia. The Saxons got these dogs from Wales; they always seem to have been favourite hounds, and there can be little doubt, from illustrations in old MSS., that coursing was an Anglo-Saxon pastime, and that the hounds there depicted in the leash in couples were slipped at game very much as greyhounds always have been. For a long time after the Norman Conquest we know nothing of coursing, though there are frequent incidental allusions to the greyhound and his high repute, but principally as distinctive of the rank and grandeur of his possessor. A greyhound was among the most highly prized of gifts in times when the custom of making presents was an important point in social ceremony. It was an especial favourite with ladies and with the clergy. In the old metrical romance of "Sir Eglamore" a princess tells the knight that she would, as an especial mark of |