Moorland and Stream, with Notes aid Prose Idyls on Shooting
and Trout-fishing. By W. Barry. (Tinsley.)--The love of field sports is so Inborn in Englishmen, that even to those who seldom or never handle gun or rod a good book of hunting or shooting adventures has a fascination for which they would find it hard to account. There is a healthy, breezy, open-air freshness about such writings, and the descriptions of long tramps over heath and moorland are refreshing to the eity-pent man but the'socret of his satisfaction lies deeper, in that instinct of the natural man which may be either suppressed or left undeveloped, but which is seldom quite extinguished. We wish we could say that Mr. Barry's Moorland and Stream is a work of this sort. It might, we believe, have been made so ; but it is not, in spite of the genuine sportsman-like feeling it shows its writer to possess, and in spite of very good descrip- tive touches of wildIrish and rustic English scenery, more than a second- rate copy of greater masters. As long as Mr. Barry keeps to his gun and his fishing-tackle he is more than readable. Something of the touch of a master of his craft makes us follow his wonderful hits and not less wonderful misses with admiration and pleasure. His account of tho life and ways of his Irish uncle, nothing if not a sportsman, his anecdotes of dogs and snatches of English character are good; but his prose idyls are prosy where they are not vulgar, and they fill up too much of the slender volume before us, not to make us wish sincerely that it wore yet slenderer. Let Mr. Barry carefuly avoid love- passages, so called, in any future work, and not attempt to be poetical. Let him eschew prose idyls and stick to his sportsman's craft, and his notes may run to twice their present length without wearying his readers.
Previous page
