h who has not his own pastime, depend on't, austere as
he may look; and 'twould be well for this wicked world if no elder in it
had a "sin that maist easily beset him," worse than what Gibby Watson's
wife used to call his "awfu' fondness for the Grews!"

And who that loves to walk or wander over the green earth, except indeed
it merely be some sonnetteer or ballad-monger, if he had time and could
afford it, and lived in a tolerably open country, would not keep, at the
very least, three greyhounds? No better eating than a hare, though old
blockhead Burton--and he was a blockhead, if blockhead ever there was
one in this world--in his Anatomy, chooses to call it melancholy meat.
Did he ever, by way of giving dinner a fair commencement, swallow a
tureen of hare-soup with half-a-peck of mealy potatoes? If ever he
did--and notwithstanding called hare melancholy meat, there can be no
occasion whatever for now wishing him any further punishment. If he
never did--then he was on earth the most unfortunate of men. England--as
you love us and yourself--cultivate hare-soup, without for a moment
dreaming of giving up roasted hare well stuffed with stuffing, jelly
sauce being handed round on a large trencher. But there is no such thing
as melancholy meat--neither fish, flesh, nor fowl--provided only there
be enough of it. Otherwise, the daintiest dish drives you to despair.
But independently of spit, pot, and pan, what delight in even daunering
about the home-farm seeking for a hare! It is quite an art or science.
You must consult not only the wind and weather of to-day, but of the
night before--and of every day and night back to last Sunday, when
probably you were prevented by the rain from going to church. Then hares
shift the sites of their country seats every season. This month they
love the fallow field--that, the stubble; this, you will see them,
almost without looking for them, big and brown on the bare stony upland
lea--that, you must have a hawk's eye in your head to discern, discover,
detect them, like birds in their nests, embowered below the bunweed or
the bracken; they choose to spend this week in a wood impervious to wet
or wind--that, in a marsh too plashy for the plover; now you may depend
on finding madam at home in the sulks within the very heart of a
bramble-bush or dwarf black-thorn thicket, while the squire cocks his
fud at you from the top of a knowe open to blasts from all the
airts;--in short, he who knows at al