The stag, so a noble lord pointed out at a meeting of the Sporting League, was “a most pampered animal.” “When he was going to be hunted, he was carried to the meet in a comfortable cart. When set down, the first thing he did was to crop the grass. When the hounds got too near, they were stopped. By and by he lay down, and was wheeled back to his comfortable home. It was a life many would like to live.” Thus it was shown to be a deprivation, to humans and non-humans alike, not to be hunted by a pack of staghounds over a country of barbed wire and broken bottles. Life seemed poor and mean without it. Fox-hunting, too, has always been refreshingly rich in sophistries. The farmer is adjured to be grateful to the Hunt, because the fox is killed, and the fox because his species (not himself) is “preserved”$1 thus the sportsman takes credit either way--on the one hand, for the destruction of a pest; on the other, for saving similar pests from extermination. It is a scene for a Gilbertian opera or a “Bab Ballad”; it makes one feel that this British blood-sport must be deleterious not only to the victims of the chase, but to the mental capacity of the gentlemen who indulge in it. The climax of absurdity was reached, perhaps, in the dedication by the Archbishop of York (Dr. Cosmo Lang) of a stained window--a _very_ stained window, as was remarked at the time--in the church of Moor Monkton, to the memory of the Rev. Charles Slingsby, an aged blood-sportsman who broke his neck in the hunting-field. That a minister should have been “launched into eternity,” as the phrase is, while chasing a fox, might have been expected to cause a sense of deep pain, if not shame, to his co-religionists: what happened was that an Archbishop was found willing to eulogize, in a consecrated place of worship, not only the old gentleman whose life was thus thrown away, but the sport of fox-hunting itself: Dr. Lang pronounced, in fact, what may be called the Foxology. Of the stained window, with its representation, on one part, of St. Hubert and the stag, and on the other of St. Francis--yes, St. Francis--giving his blessing to the birds, one can only think with a smile. A few months later, an Izaak Walton memorial window was placed in Winchester Cathedral in honour of “the quaint old cruel coxcomb” whom Byron satirized. Whether, in this work of religious art, the pious angler is portrayed in the act of impaling the live frog on the hook “as if he loved him,” the newspapers did not state.