CHAPTER CXCI. A SERIOUS WORD IN SAD APOLOGY FOR ONE OF THE MANY FOOLISH WAYS IN WHICH TIME IS MIS-SPENT. Time as he passes us, has a dove's wing, Unsoil'd, and swift, and of a silken sound; But the World's Time, is Time in masquerade! Their's, should I paint him, has his pinions fledged, With motley plumes; and where the peacock shews His azure eyes, is tinctured black and red With spots quadrangular of diamond form, Ensanguined hearts, clubs typical of strife, And spades, the emblem of untimely graves. COWPER. Hunting, gaming and dancing are three propensities to which men are inclined equally in the savage and in the civilized,—in all stages of society from the rudest to the most refined, and in all its grades; the Doctor used to say they might be called semi-intellectual. The uses of hunting are obvious wherever there are wild animals which may be killed for food, or beasts of prey which for our own security it is expedient to destroy. Indeed because hunting, hawking and fishing (all which according to Gwillim and Plato are comprised in the term Venation) tend to the providing of sustenance for man, Farnesius doth therefore account them all a species of agriculture. The great heraldic author approves of this comprehensive classification. But because the more heroic hunting in which danger is incurred from the strength and ferocity of the animals pursued, hath a resemblance of military practice, he delivers his opinion that “this noble kind of venation is privileged from the title of an Illiberal Art, being a princely and generous exercise; and those only, who use it for a trade of life, to make sure thereof, are to be marshalled in the rank of mechanics and illiberal artizans.” The Doctor admired the refinement of these authors, but he thought that neither lawful sporting, nor poaching could conveniently be denominated agricultural pursuits. He found it not so easy to connect the love of gaming with any beneficial effect; some kind of mental emotion however, he argued, was required for rendering life bearable by creatures with whom sleep is not so compleatly an act of volition, that like dogs they can lie down and fall asleep when they like. For those persons therefore who are disposed either by education, capacity, or inclination to make any worthier exertion of their intellectual faculties, gaming, though infinitely dangerous as a passion, may be useful as a pastime. It has indeed a strong tendency to assume a dangerous type, and to induce as furious an excitement as drunkenness in its most ferocious form, but among the great card-playing public of all nations, long experience has produced an effect in mitigating it analogous to what the practice of inoculation has effected upon the small-pox. Vaccination would have afforded our philosopher a better illustration if it had been brought into notice during his life.