The nineteenth century was, beyond all others, the century of big game hunters, and of books about big game. From the days of Nimrod to our own there have been mighty hunters before the Lord, and most warlike and masterful races have taken kindly to the chase, as chief among those rough pastimes which appeal naturally to men with plenty of red blood in their veins. But until the nineteenth century the difficulties of travel were so great that men of our race with a taste for sport could rarely gratify this taste except in their own neighborhood. The earlier among the great conquering kings of Egypt and Assyria, when they made their forays into Syria and the region of the Upper Euphrates, hunted the elephant and the wild bull, as well as the lions with which the country swarmed; and Tiglath-Pileser the First, as overlord of Phœnicia, embarked on the Mediterranean, and there killed a “sea-monster,” presumably a whale—a feat which has been paralleled by no sport-loving sovereign of modern times, save by that stout hunter, the German Kaiser; though I believe the present English King, like several members of his family, has slain both elephants and tigers before he came to the throne. But the elephant disappeared from Eastern Asia a thousand years before our era; and the lion had become rare or unknown in lands where the dwellers were of European stock, long before the days of written records. There was good hunting in Macedonia in the days of Alexander the Great; there was good hunting in the Hercynian Forest when Frank and Bergund were turning Gaul into France; there was good hunting in Lithuania and Poland as late as the days of Sobiéski; but the most famous kings and nobles of Europe, within historic times, though they might kill the aurochs and the bison, the bear and the boar, had no chance to test their prowess against the mightier and more terrible beasts of the tropics. No modern man could be more devoted to the chase than were the territorial lords of the Middle Ages. Two of the most famous books of the chase ever written were the _Livre de Chasse_ of Count Gaston de Foix—Gaston Phœbus, well known to all readers of Froissart—and the translation or adaptation and continuation of the same, the “Master of Game,” by that Duke of York who “died victorious” at Agincourt. Mr. Baillie-Grohman, himself a hunter and mountaineer of wide experience, a trained writer and observer, and a close student of the hunting lore of the past, has edited and reproduced the “Master of Game,” in form which makes it a delight to every true lover of books no less than to every true lover of sport. A very interesting little book is Clamorgan’s _Chasse du Loup_, dedicated to Charles the Ninth of France; my copy is of the edition of 1566. The text and the illustrations are almost equally attractive.