To these difficulties, which are peculiar to stag-hunting, must be added one that is common to all forms of hunting-that is, working out the twists and turns made by the hunted animal, especially when sinking. There are periods in the course of most hunts when the deer seems hopelessly lost. The huntsman knows that he has neither gone to ground nor climbed a tree, and so far has the advantage over his fox-hunting colleague; but, on the other hand, the fox-hunter can draw for another fox, whereas one stag is usually enough for one day. And so it often happens that a deer is an hour or more ahead of hounds. He has then plenty of time to make arrangements for baffling his enemies. Sometimes he will run along a road, then come back on his own tracks, sometimes go up to a fence, but, instead of jumping, run down beside it, either to jump or turn back further on. Sometimes he will make an enormous bound into thick gorse or coppice, and lie there concealed, not moving unless hounds or man come actually on top of him. But the most perplexing case of all is when a deer beats back on his own tracks for perhaps half a mile. Hounds and horsemen coming on the forward line completely obliterate the scent in the opposite direction. I remember a hind baffling hounds near Cothelstone for an hour and a half by that manoeuvre. An old hound then put her out of a patch of gorse within a few yards of where the whole hunt had come along. It is the slow hunting after a deer a long way ahead that appeals to the old stag-hunter, while it may bore the hardriding stranger. Every time the line is recovered is a triumph for hounds and huntsman; and when, after long hours of patient work, sometimes under a scorching sun, sometimes in pouring rain, the occasional notes of hounds slowly working out the line suddenly change into the frantic chorus that proclaims a fresh find, the stag-hunter, old or young, gets those few moments of delirious excitement which are the acme of every form of sport. Even then it may not be all over. It is possible that hounds have put up, not the hunted deer, but a fresh one. It may be that those who see the deer cannot be sure; for after a long rest a hunted deer may look quite fresh. Then watch the hounds. If the old hounds, outpaced earlier in the day, are dashing to the front, you may be sure they have a sinking deer in front of them. Some two years ago, on a very hot day, hounds were laid on at Yard Down about three in the afternoon. They ran right across the moor to Lord Lovelace's plantation. There fresh deer were on foot and difficulties ensued. After some time hounds drove a stag up from the depths of the covert. He had two short points on either horn. So had the hunted stag; so have countless others. It was uncertain at first whether this was a fresh deer or not; but when hounds came up after him there were old hounds that had been tufting for three hours in the morning driving at the head of the pack. There was no doubt then, and the stag was killed at Porlock just before dark.

I have tried to describe the fascination and difficulties of hunting a VOL. LXIV-No. 378

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stag. They must have come home forcibly to all who took part in a run from Cutcombe on October 6, 1906. On that day we started with three stags, and ran them into a wet mist. We emerged after one of them. Then a false holloa gave the stag a long start. After that we twice got on fresh deer. Once a clever bit of slotting set things right. Once a sage old hound stuck to the line of the hunted deer while all his fellows went wrong. Then followed a tortuous line over heathery enclosures. It was all slow hunting, each hound doing his very best. Presently they came to a marshy bottom. We had to go round, and lost sight of them for a few minutes. We were in a country seldom reached by stag-hounds, and had run a thirteen-mile point. We were wondering where we should get to next, when suddenly from the other side of the swamp came the sound of hounds baying. They had come right up to the stag in a pool beside a great beech fence. All was soon over then, and we found it was the biggest of the three that had been roused nearly five hours before. It was a very contented little band that gathered round the fallen monarch. For to kill your deer is success; to lose him is failure; and the greater the difficulties the sweeter the success when it comes.

Such are the pleasures of the chase of the deer; and the memory of these things is pleasant too. The stag roused after a long draw, the quick gallop over the moor, the long check, the fresh find, the last wild rush down the water, and the long ride home, very tired, very wet, very hungry, maybe a little thirsty, but, above all, very happy. Such recollections are dear to many; and with them I make bold to say, the association is not of cruelty, but of good fellowship, good health, great endeavour, and great enjoyment. If any doubt me, let him come and see for himself. The season begins on the 5th of August. Felix jaustumque sit.

R. A. SANDERS.

THE NEO-ROYALIST MOVEMENT IN

FRANCE

VERY few readers will, I am sure, glance at this preposterous title without feeling either surprise or distrust. The day is far when the Republican constitution seemed so much a fact of yesterday that it could hardly be expected to be one of to-morrow, when the notion that there is a radical incompatibility between the French temperament and democratic institutions was regarded as an incontrovertible principle, and when you could rouse the whole country by the mere mention of a Royalist plot. Who remembers now that the Republic was actually founded by Royalists, who thought that a few years of that harmless and ephemeral government might give them time to adjust their internal difficulties? Who remembers their disgust, and, soon after, their rage at finding themselves caught in their own snares? What used to be called the Conservative party seems to belong-does, indeed, belong to a generation gone. The idea that a Duc de Broglie was a Republican Premier seems an absurdity. Nineteen peasants out of twenty ignore the very name of the Duc d'Orléans. Ask the average journalist-nay, the average Deputy-who is the present Royalist leader in Parliament. He will be silent for a minute, and at last will hesitate between two or three names. You could count on the fingers of one hand the Royalists who get themselves returned to the Chamber under their own ticket. Every now and then the Gaulois announces that the Duc d'Orléans is cruising in the North Sea, or doing Napoleon's battle-fields under the guidance of a retired general, and all the papers print the news in their fashionable column, but it awakes less interest than the expeditions of the Prince of Monaco. The Legitimist feeling is dead, and the Royalist party gone; nobody deplores that the Pretender is childless.

What interest can the present writer hope to gain to a revival of the monarchist ideal by thus prefacing what he has to say? Who will listen to the praise or dispraise of Orlando's mare?"

The fact is that the curious phenomenon to which I would invite attention seems, in its present stage, to be exclusively of speculative import. It is an intellectual rather than a political manifestation,

but as such it has taken a development which can no longer be left unnoticed.

The old Royalist party was virtually destroyed by the Boulangist catastrophe and by the famous encyclical of Leo the Thirteenth on Republican loyalism a duty to Catholics. With a very few exceptions the Royalists could never account very clearly for their hopes. They felt sure that the Republic could not last, that was all. The deeply religious Comte de Chambord waited for God's hour,' just as the more fatalist Duc d'Orléans still waits for the 'shifting of the wind'; but both Legitimists and Orleanists have never ceased to associate in their minds the Restoration with some sudden transformation of the public spirit. To the typical Royalist nobleman the Republic is a government of underbred individuals, occasionally exposed by an accident like the Panama affair, and caring more for their profits than for their politics. Such a man must feel sure that even the rudest peasant cannot but realise some day the unworthiness of his masters, and, by a natural consequence, go back to his old leaders. Never were hopes of this sort so near their fulfilment as in the eventful summer when General Boulanger declared war on the Government, got elected by thirty constituencies, showed himself in triumph everywhere, and seemed to have only to raise his finger to give the signal for the universal rising. Unfortunately the so-called dictator, who it was confidently asserted in Royalist circles was only a condottiere in the Orleans' pay, instead of marching into the Elysée thought it safer to take lodgings in Piccadilly, and the discomfited spectators of this gigantic farce once more sought refuge in their hopes and obscurity. Such a lesson is often lost on men of fifty, but never on their sons, and the younger generation only looked on with sceptical smiles when honest Déroulède made his quixotic gesture, and when the gallant but lamentably lightheaded Major Marchand pretended to bestride Boulanger's legendary horse. One great hope of the Royalists had always been the secular alliance of the Throne and the Altar. The doctrine of Divine right had long been taught in the seminaries as one which it bordered upon heresy to deny, and the efforts of Lacordaire, Montalembert, and the rest of the Liberal school have failed to persuade the majority of Catholics that the words Republic and Revolution were not synonymous, and one could be religious without praying for a resurrection of the ancien régime. In default of a definite programme, which the Conservative party never boasted of, such a conviction was a powerful bond, and the two hundred members of the Right appeared a rather formidable Opposition. The encyclical of February 1892, which Pope Leo the Thirteenth had designed as the charter of unity, proved the very reverse. The Royalists had appealed to the Pope's authority as long as it seemed to support their policy; the moment they heard that the things of earth ought not to be mixed up with those of heaven, they retired to their country seats to sulk and mope, got the theologians in

their persuasion to write treatises against pontifical interference, and stopped their contribution to Peter's Pence.

A few years of this highly edifying conduct were sufficient to alienate the younger clergy, suddenly become, by a mysterious process, quite democratic in tendency, break up the remnants of the Opposition, and add another element of confusion to the vast seething of appetites, prejudices, and hatreds of which France was unfortunately the scene in the last years of the past century. During the last two Parliaments monarchist opposition has consisted exclusively in teasing the Government by a violent outcry against now their weakness, now their tyranny, their unmanly fear of Germany, or their colonial foolhardiness, against Clémenceau as well as Combes, comfortably irrespective of times, men, and affairs. This childish attitude has long been beneath notice, and the soberer members of the aristocracy as soon as they come in contact with the solid realities of modern life carefully avoid to call themselves more than traditionally monarchists. There are among them several able historians, whose favourite study is naturally the France of the kings, but they are sufficiently interested in the past and present to let the future alone.

At the very moment when the Royalist feeling was growing so torpid as to seem dormant for ever the Royalist ideals were reappearing in quarters where they were the most unexpected. The tendency of the French youth to speculate, analyse, and generalise has been evident since the days of the early Romanticists. Each successive generation sees dozens of schools of French thought triumph in the Latin quarter. Year after year the final formula of the literary beau idéal is discovered by some genius under age, and sounded to the echoes of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève by a few score of clamorous admirers. Every now and then the public is deceived by all this uproar, and the utterances of a M. Lajeunesse or a M. Saint Georges Bouhélier are discussed in the Mercure de France until-the masterpieces designed to illustrate the theories not forthcoming-the theories are superseded by newfangled philosophies of art, and their inventors find themselves old by the time they are five-and-twenty.

One of the most flourishing of these short-lived little sects was undoubtedly one called Neo-Christians, alias Buddhists. It had been founded by a most estimable professor at the Collège Stanislas, M. Paul Desjardins, who, while holding the tenets of Christianity too obsolete to be preached, proved by his life and speeches that Christian morals add greatly to a man's elegance. Tolstoism is one of those doctrines which are bound to be re-invented and, to the credit of human nature, relived by many distinguished individuals, as long as the Gospel remains the Book of Mankind. But the moment it becomes a watchword the consequences must always be pretences of all sorts. Goodness is not to be worn by everybody like a fashionable hat. In fact, the disciples of M. Desjardins soon grew weary of playing