ill
our sports and pastimes flourish and increase. And long may they
flourish, more especially those in which the quality of courage is
essential for success! It will be a bad day for England when success in
our sports and pastimes no longer depends on the exercise of pluck and
manliness; when hunting gives place to bicycling, and cricket to golf;
when, in fact, the wholesome element of _danger_ is removed from our
recreation and pursuits. Should, in the near future, the long-talked-of
invasion of this country by a combination of European powers become an
accomplished fact, Englishmen may perchance be glad, as the cannon balls
and musket shots are whizzing round their heads, that on the mimic
battlefields of cricket, football, polo, and fox-hunting they learnt two
of the most useful lessons of life--coolness and courage.

[Illustration: Hawking 267.png]

CHAPTER XII.

THE COTSWOLDS THREE HUNDRED YEARS AGO.

Nowadays, thanks in a great measure to Mr. Madden's book, the "Diary of
Master William Silence," it is beginning to dawn on us that the
Cotswolds are more or less connected with the great poet of
Stratford-on-Avon.

Mr. Blunt, in his "Cotswold Dialect," gives no less than fifty-eight
passages from the works of Shakespeare, in which words and phrases
peculiar to the district are made use of. Up to the reign of Queen Anne
this vast open tract of downland formed a happy hunting ground for the
inhabitants of all the surrounding counties. Warwickshire, Oxfordshire,
and Wiltshire, as well as Gloucestershire folk repaired to the wolds for
hunting, coursing, hawking, and other amusements; and in olden times,
even more than to-day, Cotswold was, as Burton described it, "a type of
what is most commodious for hawking, hunting, wood, waters, and all
manner of pleasures." There never was a district so well adapted for
stag-hunting. Nowadays the Cotswold district falls short in one
desideratum, and that a most essential one, of being a first-rate
hunting country. The large extent of ploughed land and the extreme
dryness and poverty of the soil cause it on four days out of five to
carry a most indifferent scent. But to-day we pursue the fox; in
Shakespeare's time the stag was the quarry. And, as hunting men are well
aware, the scent given off by a stag is not only ravishing to hounds,
but it actually increases as the quarry tires, whilst that from a fox
"grows small by degrees and beautifully less."

As with hunting, so