the universal law of kindness, is cruelty, by whatever motive or feeling that deviation may be induced in justice to his humanity, and to what is better, his devout recognition of the authority of Heaven, we quote a neutralizing sentence from the same discourse:-" In the view that we have now given, and which we deem of advantage, for the right practical treatment of our question, it may be conceived, that we palliate the atrociousness of cruelty. It is forgotten, that a charge of foulest delinquency may be made up altogether of wants, or of negatives; and just as the human face, by the mere want of some of its features, although there should not be any inversion of them, might be an object of utter loathsomeness to beholders: so the human character, by the mere absence of certain habits, or certain sensibilities, which belong ordinarily and constitutionally to our species, may be an object of utter abomination in society. The want of natural affections forms one article of the apostle's indictment against our world; and certain it is, that the total want of it were stigma enough for the designation of a monster. The mere want of religion or irreligion, is enough to make man

an outcast from his God. Even to the most barbarous of our kind, you apply not the term of anti-humanity, but of inhumanity—not the term of anti-sensibility; and you hold it enough for the purpose of branding him for general execration, that you convicted him of complete and total insensibility. He is regaled, it is true, by a spectacle of agony, but not because of the agony. It is something else therewith associated which regales him. But still he is rightfully the subject of most emphatic denunciation, not because regaled by, but because regardless of the agony. We do not feel ourselves to be vindicating the cruel man, when we affirm it to be not altogether certain whether he rejoices in the extinction of life; for we count it a deep atrocity that, unlike the righteous man of Scripture, he simply does not regard the life of a beast. You may, perhaps, have been accustomed to look upon the negatives of character, as making up a sort of neutral or midway innocence. But this is a mistake. Unfeeling is but a negative quality, and yet we speak of an unfeeling monster." Surely it is not by negations that so many agonies are inflicted for the sake of pastime and amusement. The

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thing is done with deliberation and forethought, by rational creatures themselves, capable, like the victims they torture, of intense suffering, and who, therefore, ought to possess the sympathies of the nature they share in common. It appears to us, that there is not less cruelty in the action which wounds and agonizes a poor animal, because other motives are blended with it. that a man is regaled by a spectacle of agony, and we think no sophistry can clear him from the charge of being cruel, especially when it is remembered that it is a spectacle which he creates for himself, that he provides, as well as enjoys the feast. What gratification would the chase offer to the most humane sportsman, if he did not put life in jeopardy, and if death were not to be hailed as its finale and its triumph? Even the Spectator, who defends hunting, and has exhibited some of its most animating circumstances in the field, apprehensive of the cruelty that might be imputed to his favourite Sir Roger de Coverly, for his early exploits in slaughtering hares and foxes without number, tells us, that in the latter part of his life he procured a pack of stop-hounds, and hunted simply for the pleasure of the exercise-that

is, of only terrifying to death the animals the dogs had been accustomed to kill. "If I was under any concern, it was on the account of the poor hare that was now quite spent, and almost within reach of her enemies, when the huntsman getting forward, threw down his pole before the dogs. They were now within eight yards of that game which they had been pursuing for almost as many hours; yet, on the signal before mentioned, they all made a sudden stand, and though they continued opening as much as before, durst not once attempt to pass beyond the pole. At the same moment, Sir Roger rode forward, and alighting took up the hare in his arms, which he soon after delivered up to one of his servants, with an order, if she could be kept alive, to let her go in his great orchard; where, it seems, he has several of these prisoners of war, who live together in a very comfortable captivity." What is this but a vain attempt to conceal from the writer's own mind the inhumanity of a practice he had not the courage to condemn ?

Disguise it how we will, cruelty is the necessary accompaniment of this, and of all similar amusements, it is in vain to palliate it by the

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device of wants and negatives. The sport that cannot be enjoyed without the protracted sufferings and terrors of an innocent victim, is not negative; it does not spring from want of feeling; it is the presence of bad feeling. It is the sensibility, not of a man, but of a demon. will Dr. Chalmers think of his eloquent coadjutor in Edinburgh, Professor Wilson? "It is remarkable," he observes, "that man is the only cruel animal. The brutes of the forest are fierce, but their ferocity is for food. They never kill but to feed. The tiger, the wolf, and the wild dog frequently kill more than they can devour at the time, but this slaughter is only because their instinct loves the blood in preference to the flesh, still it is appetite. Wild beasts scarcely ever tear their own kind. Man, in fact, is the only being who enjoys the terrors, wounds, and death of others, the only animal who kills in sport, and for sport."

We have seen how a Scottish professor treats the subject of hunting; let us now view it as described by an Anglican bishop, Dr. Stillingfleet, who in his Dialogues on the Amusements of Clergymen, sees nothing of ancestral dignity and glory in this favourite pastime of joyous Old England. He calls