. Old sports and sportsmen : or, The Willey country. s which adorn the Willeycountry and many other. portions of the for our woods and the creeping thingsthey shelter, we should have imperfect conceptionsof those earlier phases of the island:— When stalked the bison from his shaggy lair,Thousands of years before the silent airWas pierced by whizzing shafts of hunters keen. The country would have been wanting in subjectssuch as Creswick, with faithful expressions of foliageand knowledge of the play of light and shade, hasdepicted. It would have lost the text-work ofthose characteris
. Old sports and sportsmen : or, The Willey country. s which adorn the Willeycountry and many other. portions of the for our woods and the creeping thingsthey shelter, we should have imperfect conceptionsof those earlier phases of the island:— When stalked the bison from his shaggy lair,Thousands of years before the silent airWas pierced by whizzing shafts of hunters keen. The country would have been wanting in subjectssuch as Creswick, with faithful expressions of foliageand knowledge of the play of light and shade, hasdepicted. It would have lost the text-work ofthose characteristics Constable revelled in, andthose Harding gave us in his oaks. We shouldhave lost subjects for the poet as well as for thepainter ; for the ballad literature of the countrj?- isredolent of sights and sounds associated therewith. 46 ROYAL CHASE OF SHIKLOT. To come down from the earliest times. How theold Druids reverenced them ! how the compilersof that surprising survey of the country we find inDomesday noted all details concerning them ! what. <rm joyous allusions Chaucer, Spenser, and later writersmake to them! what peculiar charms the merrygreen-wood and the deep forest glades had forthe imagination of the people ! Hence the popularsympathy expressed by means of tales and tradi- EOYAL CHASE OF SHIELOT. 47 tions in connection with Sherwoods sylvan shade,and the many editions of the song of the bold out-law, and of the adventures contained therein. Eventhe utilitarian philosopher and the ultra radical,fleeing from the stifling atmosphere of the town,and diving for an hour or so into some paternalwood, is inclined, we fancy, to sponge from hismemory the bitter things he has said of the ownersand of that aristocratic class who usually value andguard them as they do their picture to such as these, there is now scarcely a runin the Willey country but brings the sportsmanface to face with vestiges of some sylvan memorialNature or man has planted along the h
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