First and foremost, he now gave a great banquet to his wealthy friends—and no man with a million and a half is without them, and in abundance. In the second place, he gave a substantial dinner to all his tenantry, from the wealthy farmer of five hundred acres to the tenant of a cottage. On this occasion he said, “Game is a subject of great heart-burnings, and of great injustice to the country. It was the bane of my predecessor, let us take care that it is not ours. Let every man kill the game on the land that he rents, then he will neither destroy it utterly, nor allow it to grow into a nuisance. I am fond of a gun myself, and my sons probably will be more so; but we shall find game enough in our own fields and woods for our destructive propensities, without fostering such a swarm of these animals as may lead us to degenerate into game-butchers. Gentlemen, I should as soon think of setting up to kill my own oxen, as to kill game merely for the sake of killing it. The healthy excitement of the chase vanishes when a very inundation of the animals pursued rolls under our feet, and a satiating slaughter takes the place of a keen and vigorous search after it. To hunt!—yes, the word expresses what field-sports once were—the game had to be hunted out. Now the foreign name best designates it—battu, beat it up, and knock it ignobly on the head. Gentlemen, whenever we may occasionally extend our pursuit of game beyond the fields of the home-farm and the woods, across the lands of our tenants, it shall not be to carry off the first-fruits of their feeding, and we will still hold the enjoyment as a favour.” We need not say that this speech was applauded most vociferously.