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STANZA S.

BY ZOE.

And shall I always feel the same,
And really never cease to sigh?
Will Time, that changes all on earth,
Pass me alone unheeded by?

Shall I be true to one who ne'er

Has breathed one sigh of love to me?

And pass those years that should be glad

In hopeless tears and misery?

We shall not meet on earth again;

A happier love will soon be thine;

And absence and neglect have oft

Chilled hearts that once were warm as mine.

A ring upon my mother's hand

Oft, as a child, I did admire ;

She said it was the gift of one

Who loved her ere she knew my sire.

I've seen her gaze upon that ring;
That pledge of early hope and truth;
And scarcely grant a passing sigh
Unto the love of her youth.

Yet she would say: "I loved him once;
"But he at last proved false to me;
"He sought a wealthier bride;" shall I'
So coldly learn to speak of thee?
And will they be forgotten too;

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Those friends, whom now I love so well;
Or but remembered as a dream

In waking hours? I scarce can tell.

I do not think I shall forget;
And yet, without a hope we part;

I see so many change around,

I hardly dare to trust my heart.

But now, much rather would I chuse
To pass my life in wretchedness;
O more than all the wrath of fate,

I dread such heartless fickleness!

VOL. II.

2 P

ZOE.

A WORD MORE ON THE GAME LAWS.

We consider that one of the most distinguishing advantages of a periodical press, is the opportunity which is afforded of repeatedly bringing any weighty question before the public, and presenting it from time to time, for consideration, with such additional remarks as may best serve to awaken and to keep alive attention. We are not impressed with the idea of being very new or original in any thing we may have to urge upon the subject of the Game Laws. Their justice and policy have so often been discussed, and with such distinguished ability, by the advocates for a vital alteration, that we only purpose to reiterate some of the most forcible arguments which have been already urged at various times, and to call solemnly upon the public to unite in demanding from our knights of the shot belt, some change, if it be only an experimental one, to be made in the present terrible and demoralizing system.

There is no reflecting man who ever opens a daily newspaper, who has not been very lately horror struck with the reports of the frequent and terrible conflicts; the unnumbered committals; the degrading and nationally disgraceful effects of the present sanguinary, yet ineffectual, code of game legislation. Turn over the papers for a few days past:-Eleven men committed for trial (several severely wounded), for shooting at the Hon. Mr. Edwards, near Norwich. Lord Roseberry's gamekeeper shot. The gamekeeper of Mr. Bryan Cooke, near Doncaster, shot dead. A great fight on Mr. Whitbread's estate at Southhill. A second Waterloo between twelve poachers and the keepers at Claughton Hall, Lancashire; no returns of killed or wounded. To say nothing of all the minor offences, and the extent of which may be gathered from the fact of county papers making a weekly return of the numbers committed, balancing so many score more or less than the last! Every body who indulges one patriotic thought, asks, when and where are these horrors to end? Can nothing be done? Can no experiment be made that will afford us hope of checking this monstrous evil; this systematic school for robbery and murder; and yet preserve inviolate the rights of the landholders?

The advocates for the perpetuity of the present system, as in many other instances, have met with very efficient supporters from weak and unthinking adversaries. Many, who clearly see the evils of the present system, have mixed so many weak and unsound arguments with those that have been really powerful and convincing, that the weight and efficacy of the latter have been frequently rendered. neutral and unavailing. Multitudes of well-meaning men, for example, will talk of game being feræ naturâ; that it is the property of any one and of every one; of the injury to the farmers; of the oppressiveness and tyranny of claiming a right to wild animals; and other drivelling of a similar nature. The whole of this we pronounce to be the merest twaddle from first to last; and if the landowners are

to effect a change for no other reasons, and upon no other principles, all hope of change must be for ever abandoned.

The landlords have a right to game bred and fattened on their land; an undoubted right to rear and preserve as great a quantity of it as they may think fit. It is the most vulgar and repulsive form of ignorance to treat as a hardship the fact of a landowner rearing speckled wild fowl on his own land, at his own cost, and then saying to a second person who never was a farthing the worse for it, this game is mine. When the case of birds which cost the landlords twenty shillings a-head is in dispute, it is nauseous folly to slobber about the rights of all men to pursue wild animals. And as to injury to the farmers, every body who ever saw a farm, knows very intimately, that the whole of the loss falls directly upon the landlord. A game farm is not unfrequently the most profitable one to the farmer, who in driving a bargain is so clamorous and pathetic about the game, that he almost invariably gets the farm at full 25 per cent. less than it is honestly worth.

The landowners have, in a word, a full right, that is, a legal and warranted right, to every power over game which they now enjoy. The game is theirs by every title which can constitute ownership, and he must be a most furious innovater, or a most raw and callow cockney, who can bring himself to doubt of this. But let us ask, let the landlords themselves ask, do the present laws effectually preserve our game? Are our ends fully answered under the multiplied rigors of our game convictions, our shootings, and our transportings? On the contrary, we see that the whole moral aspect of the country is being gradually changed, an internecive war between landlords and laborers is enkindled, and slaughterings and hangings about wild fowl, are every day occurrences, at once the pastime and parlor study of our country gentlemen.

Gracious Heaven! to think of the changes which are daily working in our farm laborers, by the indescribable horrors of the system. Of what character, but a very few years ago, were our villagers? Timid, industrious, regular and sober in their habits, abhorring the idea of blood and danger-domestic-viewing a night tramper as a man devoid of natural affections, a traitor, and an atheist; looking upon their landlords with feelings of mingled awe and affection, as though it was by his bounty and forbearance they held the breath of their nostrils. What now are the thoughts and habits of tens of thousands of these self same men? Incited by the miserable system to gain a desperate livelihood by habitual misdemeanour, they have become fierce, idle, reckless of blood; familiarized with drunkenness and irregularity of all kinds, they have become colleagued and identified with felons and murderers; by gradual progress in their career of vicious irregularity, they view the landowner as their most oppressive enemy, as a tyrannous usurper of their rights, and at last seek, as we have had instances, opportunities of sealing their hatred by his blood.

Is there any one will now come forward and say, that there is

any hope in a multiplication of penalties and an increase of severity? These have been so accumulated on our statute book, that the game lords themselves, not remarkable for their modesty on the subject, are almost ashamed of publicly allowing their full extent. Increase of punishments, extension of powers to magistrates, above all, transportation for being out at night with the intention of killing game. These have been the medicines by which our amateurs of powder and patent shot have hitherto dreamed of curing the evil. Every fresh accumulation of punishment has proved the source of an accumulation of guilt. A poacher who has the fear of transportation before his eyes, very naturally argues it worth a struggle, he fires with the phantasma of Botany Bay before his intellectual vision-it is not increase of hatred to the keeper, but overwhelming dread of the hulks; and he adds to this the knowledge, that his punishment cannot be greatly increased by this, his last, effort of guilt and despair.

It is quite worthy of notice, that such is the indescribable absurdity and inconsistency of the whole hare and bird code, that they who have made these laws, they who most loudly halloo for their continuance and necessity, are themselves continually in the habit of breaking through them, or encouraging the breach of them by others. We have sometimes been amused in reading the accounts of the great days of St. Bartholomew among cocks and hens, the accounts of which were expressly inserted to raise the wonder and enmity of rival poulterers; we have been edified to observe, that half the names of these disciples of lead and sulphur themselves, were those of unqualified persons, men whom the law prohibits from shooting on any terms. None but a man actually possessing 100l. a year freehold, or the eldest son of an esquire, or any higher degree, dare to draw a trigger, if he obeys the law. And yet you may any day see Mr. Baring with his friends, the younger sons of gentlemen, who are dazzled by money bags, or his friend who may be worth a million in Exchequer Bills, coolly taking the field maugre the game code. Do we think the Ringwood poacher does not observe, in both these cases, this Hampshire autocrat of partridges and per cents. encouraging a direct and palpable breach of the law? With a view of shewing the necessity of a general revision of these ferocious and inapplicable laws, we should wish no better sport than to see Johnson, or any other constitutional and practised informer, with informations in his pocket against many of your most noted unqualified sportsmen. How would your game magistrates act? Oh, day of sorrow for the Honorables! of defeat for the Lancers! of repentance for Doctors of Divinity!

The extravagance of the whole thing may be summed up, when we recollect nothing but an increase of severity against poachers has ever been tried with a view to curing these evils. Men of the first rank and consequence in society, men interested to the very greatest degree in the rights of landowners, nay, more, ministers of state have themselves proposed remedies which, however ably recommended, have been scouted and negatived by the dog-whistle party. They

will hear of nothing, try nothing, argue nothing. We would not be uncharitable, but really the conduct of some of the magistrate land and game lords, would bring us to believe that they felt quite as much delight in routing a poacher, as in putting up a hare-quite as much exhiliration of spirits in sending an idle laborer to be tutored to vice in jail, as in bagging a leash of pheasants. Why this obstinate opposition, on this point alone, to the minister? Why this hardened resolution not to try any thing?

The most admirable and effectual alteration proposed by Lord Wharncliffe and Mr. Peel for the two last Sessions, was simply to legalize the sale of game; and no doubt whatever can be reasonably entertained, but this change would go to the root of the mischief. How does the case really stand? People like to have hares and pheasants at their tables, as they like to have geese and house lamb. The former cannot be purchased on any terms, without a direct breach of the law; and the result is, that the moral notions of the great body of the people upon this point, have undoubtedly become much more lax and unprecise than can at all be justified. Respectable poulterers think it no discredit to deal in game by the thousand; men, who in other affairs would scorn a mean or disreputable action, are obliged to commit and encourage felony, and quiet their consciences with the excuse, that they cannot sell, nor their customers eat, game, upon any other terms. Well-bred people, with correct notions upon all other moral topics, but who would inevitably be undone without game at their dinner parties, buy the game, thus illegally gotten and sold, although they would as soon eat a barn door fowl of questionable transfer, as pick the pockets of their guests. We have nothing to do with the right or wrong of these distinctions; they have got abroad, they exist, and the practical legislator must appreciate and consult them.

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As the matter stands at present, the poacher enjoys the whole of this profitable traffic. He is only in his vocation. Game must be had, and you cannot get game by any other means. He is in correspondence with Mr. the rich London poulterer, who wants at the least a thousand head of game against Lord Mayor's Day. Can flesh and blood be expected to withstand the temptation? Here goes for a slap at the keepers. Lord Wharncliffe very plainly states, "I like my game, I hate poachers, deal with them as severely as you "please, but remove the overwhelming temptation by opening a chan"nel through which honest dealers may come honestly by game, and "conscientious epicures satisfy their orthodoxy in eating it. No "dealer in venison buys stolen deer, and, except for his own use, we "know that a deer stalker had better be in bed-he has no sale, no "hope of a market. Many gentlemen of small estates, or large "estates and small means, would be glad to supply those whose "carnality led them to game; the profits of the poacher would be "annihilated; the chief temptation to his crime would be removed; " and we should hear no more of him.”

Thus wisely and practically reasoned my incipient Lord Wharn

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