RECOLLECTIONS OF SPORT: AMONG FIN, FUR, AND FEATHER.
Recollections of Sport : among Fin, Fur, and Feather. By James Conway. (Digby, Long, and Co. 6s.)—We have read Mr. Conway's new book with some pleasure, for he describes his sport with such enthusiasm, and he is such a successful angler and shot, that it is impossible for a lover of sport not to envy him. He describes days of trout and salmon fishing in the Highlands, wild- fowl shooting he has enjoyed in estuaries, some deer-stalking, and the shooting of a mountain fox that had taken to sheep-killing. Occasionally his descriptions give the reader a very good picture of the sport. Mr. Conway is evidently not much of a naturalist, or he would know that the so-called osprey feathers of the milliners are not the plumage of the osprey or fishing hawk, a bird which- is now all but extinct in Scotland, though not owing to plume-hunters. Unfortunately, Mr. Conway's writings are afflicted by those two terrible diseases of amateur authors,—the
use of hackneyed quotations and the abuse of inverted commas. There is no phrase too trite, no Latin tag too stale, to be intro- duced, often more than once. Byron and Milton are misquoted, and the French is misspelt. There are a few puns which make the reader shiver. The whole book would have been vastly im- proved if some one had cut out all the Latin, French, and Italian ; all references to refreshing the inner man and similar phrases; and all the parts about the condescending Scotch Baronets and others whose honoured guest the author has been. If the inverted commas with which every page is peppered were all deleted one would hardly recognise the book.
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