I propose to treat my subject from two aspects. First I shall take the so-called sporting novels, which are in themselves a literature, though I mean to confine myself practically to a single author; and, after having touched on this subject, I shall ask you to notice how Anthony Trollope, a writer sometimes tedious, but always observant and often witty, deals with the hierarchy, clerical and lay, of county society. When St. Thomas a Becket was escaping from his enemies in England, he travelled through Flanders in humble disguise. Once, however, he nearly betrayed himself by stopping and admiring a beautiful falcon. Such discrimination raised the suspicion that the traveller was not a mere peasant or itinerant merchant, but an English gentleman of rank. However, the archbishop managed to escape detection and passed on. This little incident, however, shows that, even in the twelfth century, an expert knowledge of sport was deemed to be characteristic of gentility, and Becket, who had spent his early days in the king’s court, instinctively looked with interest on a good bird. Four centuries later a very different archbishop of Canterbury, though he too died a martyr’s death, was known as an excellent rider. Thomas Cranmer, the son of a country squire, was, we are specially told, remarkable for the firm and easy way he sat his horse. Unlike Becket, Cranmer was bred a scholar; but, in later days, he too would have been called a sportsman. About a century later another English primate distinguished himself less creditably in the field. George Abbott, the Puritan predecessor of Laud, was shooting deer; and by pure accident killed a keeper; for which an attempt was made to declare the see of Canterbury canonically vacant. It is much the same with less exalted ecclesiastics. In the middle ages the clergy of England were honourably distinguished for their morality as compared with their continental brethren. Their besetting sin was that nothing could restrain them from hunting. The “hunting” abbot of the middle ages was succeeded by the “hunting parson” of later days. Thackeray’s description of the Rev. Bute Crawley would, _mutatis mutandis_, apply to many an English clergyman, from the earliest times down to our own days. “A tall, stately, jolly, shovel-hatted man.... You might see his bay mare a score of miles away from the Rectory house whenever there was a dinner party.... He rode to hounds in a pepper-and-salt frock, and was one of the best fishermen in the county.” It is hardly necessary to dilate upon the sporting vocabulary of Shakespeare; or to point out that the correct use of hunting and shooting and hawking terms was considered as test of a man’s gentility--nor need I appeal to the severity of the old Forest Laws and the more modern Game Laws, both of which were powerless to restrain the English peasants’ inveterate propensity to sport.