"that a steward should be appointed over the sport, should match the dogs, and give orders to the field:--if the hare start on this side, you and you are to slip, and nobody else; but if on that side, you and you: and let strict attention be paid to the orders given." (Arrian, chap. xx.) Alciphron, in his familiar epistles descriptive of the domestic manners of the Greeks, gives a lively description of a course not very different from those of the present day, as will be seen in the following extract: "In trying whether the young dogs were fit for the chase, I started a hare from a little bush; my sons loosed the dogs from the slips. They frightened her confoundedly, and were very near taking the game. The hare, in her flight, climbed a steep place, and found a retreat in some burrow. One of the more spirited of the dogs, pressing close upon her, gasping, and expecting to take her in his gripe, went down with her into the hole. In endeavouring to pull out the hare, he broke one of his fore-legs. I lifted up my good dog, with his lame leg, and found the hare half devoured: thus, when I hoped to get something, I encountered a serious loss." (Letter ix.) We will close our remarks upon this subject by introducing a few descriptive lines, selected from one of the very rare English authors who have attempted a versification of this exciting sport. "Yet if for silvan sport thy bosom glow, Let thy fleet greyhound urge his flying foe. With what delight the rapid course I view! How does my eye the circling race pursue! He snaps deceitful air with empty jaws; The suttle hare darts swift beneath his paws; She flys, he stretches, now with nimble bound Eager he presses on, but overshoots his ground: Then tears with goary mouth the screaming prey." ('Gay's Poems', vol i.--'Rural Sports', v. 290),--L.] Mr. Richardson, in his History of the Greyhound, gives a different derivation of the name of this dog. He says that the 'greyhound' was of Grecian origin--'cannis Græcus',--that 'Græcus' was not unfrequently written 'Græius', and thence was derived the term 'greyhound'. This derivation, however, is somewhat too far-fetched. Mention occurs of the greyhound in a very early period of the British history. He was an inmate of the Anglo-Saxon kennels in the time of Elfric, king of Mercia. There are paintings of him that can be satisfactorily traced to the ninth century. In the time of Canute he was reckoned first in degree of rank among the canine species, and no one under the degree of a gentleman, 'liberalis', or more properly, perhaps a 'freeholder', was allowed by the forest laws to keep them. Even he could not keep them within two miles of a royal forest, unless two of the toes were cut off and for every mile that an uncut dog was found within this distance a fine of a shilling was levied on the owner. The nobleman was rarely seen abroad without his hawk upon his fist, and his greyhound at his side.