one
particular pattern, like so many bales of cloth; everybody is to
shoot with this, their speciality, and everything that has been
previously done is totally ignored. The workman in the true sense of
the word--the artist in guns--is either extinct, or hidden in an
obscure corner. There is no individuality about modern guns. One is
exactly like another. That is very well, and necessary for military
arms, because an army must be supplied with a single pattern
cartridge in order to simplify the difficulty of providing
ammunition. They fail even in the matter of ornament. The
design--if it can be called design--on one lock-plate is repeated on
a thousand others, so with the hammers. There is no originality
about a modern gun; as you handle it you are conscious that it is
well put together, that the mechanism is perfect, the barrels true,
but somehow it feels _hard_; it conveys the impression of being
machine-made. You cannot feel the _hand_ of the maker anywhere, and
the failure, the flatness, the formality of the supposed ornament,
is depressing. The ancient harquebuss makers far surpassed the very
best manufacturers of the present day. Their guns are really
artistic--works of true art. The stocks of some of the German
wheel-lock guns of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are
really beautiful specimens of carving and design. Their powder-horns
are gems of workmanship--hunting-scenes cut out in ivory, the
minutest detail rendered with life-like accuracy. They graved their
stags and boars from Nature, not from conventional designs; the
result is that we admire them now because Nature is constant, and
her fashions endure. The conventional 'designs' on our lock-plates,
etc., will in a few years be despised; they have no intrinsic
beauty. The Arab of the desert, wild, untrammelled, ornaments his
matchlock with turquoise. Our machine-made guns, double-barrel,
breech-loading, double-grip, rebounding locks, first-choice stocks,
laminated steel, or damascus barrels, choke-bore, and so forth,
will, it is true, mow down the pheasants at the battue as the scythe
cuts down the grass. There is slaughter in every line of them. But
is slaughter everything? In my idea it is not, but very far from it.
Were I offered the choice of participation in the bloodiest battue
ever arranged--such as are reserved for princes--the very best
position, and the best-finished and swiftest breech-loader invented,
or the freedom of an English forest,