They either
"pay their shot," as _Punch_ has it, in the shape of rent, or are the
guests of the noble proprietors. Their devices for circumventing the
antlered monarch of the waste are amply detailed by Scrope, Hawker,
Herbert and also by the late Edwin Landseer doing the pictorial
department with a success attributable chiefly to his management of
landscape effect, for his dogs, deer and other animals from his AEsop's
fable-like groups to his four duplicated lions in Trafalgar Square,
belong--heretic that we are to say it!--properly to still life, their
want of action and _verve_ placing them beneath comparison with the
works of either one of a score of Flemish and French painters,
from Rubens and Snyders down to Bonheur and Vernet. That his unsold
pictures have brought, since his death, something like half a million
proves nothing. Time was when the worthless canvases of West and
Morland were equally transmutable into gold.
Like other forms of British field-sports, deer-stalking is
sufficiently intricate and artificial. It is obviously the occupation
of men whose primary object is more to kill time than to kill deer.
According to print, from type and plate, the stag, a reduced edition
of the American wapiti, is, in the heart of a little kingdom of some
hundreds of souls to the square mile, as little accustomed to the
sight of man and as hard to approach as he would be on the head-waters
of the Yellowstone.
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