“Where, under any lease made subsequently to the commence- ment of this Act, or where, by presumption of common law, upon any laml oceupied under a lease made subsequently to the commcneemcnt of this Act, the lessor shall reserve or retain the sole right of hunting, killing, or taking rabbits, hares, or other game, or any of them, the lessee shall be entitled to compensation for the damage done to his crops in each year by the rabbits and hares, or other game, to which the lessor may have reserved or retained the whole right, in excess of such sum as may have been set forth in the lease as the amount of annual damage for which it is agreed no compensation shall be due; and if no such sum shall be set forth, then in excess of the sum of forty shillings.”
Scotch law, differing in this respect from English law, infers that, when the lease contains no stipulations as to game, the landlord reserves the right of killing game to himself. The Act contains provisions for settling claims of damage either by arbitration or by action at law. Leases made before the Act are not to be affected thereby. The old Act of 1621, “anent hunting and haulking, ” is cited in the schedule of the last-mentioned Act ; it “ ordaines that no man hunt nor haulk at any time hereafter who hath not a plough of land in heritage, under the pain of £100.” It is, of course, practically obsolete.
GAMES. The public games of Greece and Rome were athletic contests and spectacles of various kinds, generally connected with and forming part of a religious observance. Probably no institution exercised a greater influence in moulding the national character, and producing that unique type of physical and intellectual beauty which we see reflected in Greek art and literature, than the public contests of Greece. Fo them each youth was trained in the gymnasium, they were the central mart whither poet, artist, and merchant each brought his wares, and the common ground of union for every member of the Hellenic race. It is to Greece then that we must look for the earliest form and the fullest development of ancient games, and we propose in the present article to treat principally of the Greek dydn/ES. The shows of the Roman circus and amphitheatre were at best a shadow, and in the later days of the empire a travesty, of the Olympia and l’ythia, and require only a cursory notice. “ Corruptio optimi fit pessima.” From the noblest spectacle in the world, the Greek Olympia, the downward course of public games can be traced, till we reach the ignoblest, the Roman amphitheatre, of whose horrors we may still form a faint picture from its last survival, the Spanish bull-fight.
The earliest games of which we have any record are those at the funeral of Patroclus, which form the subject of the twenty-third Iliad. They are noticeable both as showing that the belief that the dead would be appeased or gratified by the same exhibitions which pleased them in life was a common heritage of Greeks and Romans from their Aryan progenitors, and as already including all the distinctive competitions which we find in historical times,—the chariot-race, archery, boxing, wrestling, and putting the weight. Each of the great Grecian games was held near some shrine or consecrated spot, and is connected by myth or legend with some hero, demigod, or local deity.
The Olympian games were the earliest, and to the last they remained the most celebrated of the four national festivals. Olympia was a naturally enclosed spot in the rich plain of Elis, bounded on the N. by the rocky heights of Kronos, and on the S. and W. by the Alpheus and its tributary the Kladeus. There was the grcve of Altis, in which were ranged the statues of the victorious athletes and the temple of Olympian Zeus with the chryselaphantine statue of the god, the masterpiece of Phidias. There Hercules (so ran the legend which Pindar has introduced in one of his finest odes), when he had conquered Elis and slain its king Augeas, consecrated a temenos and instituted games in honour of his victory. A later legend, which probably embodies historical fact, tells how, when Greece was torn by dissensions and ravaged by pestilence, Iphitus inquired of the oracle for help, and was hidden restore the games which had fallen into de- l suetude; and there was in the time of Pausanias, suspended in the temple of Hero. at Olympia, a bronze disk whereon were inscribed, with the regulations of the games, the names of Iphitus and Lycurgus. From this we may safely infer that the games were a primitive observance of the Eleians and Pisans, and first acquired their celebrity from the powerful concurrence of Sparta. In 776 b.c. the Eleians engraved the name of their countryman Coroebus as victor in the foot race, and thenceforward we have an almost un- broken list of the victors in each succeeding Olympiad or fourth recurrent year. For the next fifty years no names occur but those of Eleians or their next neighbours. After 720 b.c. we find Corinthians and Megareans, and later still Athenians and extra-Peloponnesians. Thus what at first was nothing more than a village bout became a bond of union for all the branches of the Doric race, and grew in time to be the high feast to which every Greek gathered, from the mountain fastnesses of Thessaly to the remotest colonies of Cyrene and Marseilles. It survived even the extinction of Greek liberty, and had nearly completed twelve centuries when it was abolished by the decree of the Christian emperor Theodosius, in the tenth year of his reign. The last Olympian victor was a Romanized Armenian named Varastad.
Let us attempt to call up the scene which Olympia in its palmy days must have presented as the great festival approached. Heralds had proclaimed throughout- Greece the truce of God, which put a stop to all warfare, and ensured to all a safe conduct during the sacred month. So religiously was this observed that the Spartans chose to risk the liberties of Greece, when the Persians were at the gates of Pylae, rather than march during the holy days. These white tents which stand out against the sombre grey of the olive groves belong to the Hellanodicm, or ten judges of the games, chosen one for each tribe of the Eleians. They have been here already ten months, receiving instruction in their duties. All, too, or most of the athletes must have arrived, for they have been undergoing the indispensable training in the gymnasium of the Altis. But along the “ holy road ” from the town of Elis there are crowding a motley throng. Conspicuous in the long train of pleasure-seekers are the 6wpor’ or sacred deputies, clad in their robes of office, and bearing with them in their carriages of state offerings to the shrine of the god. Nor is there any lack of distinguished visitors. It may be Alcibiades, who, they say, has entered no less than seven chariots; or Gorgias, who has written a famous e’m’Schi; for the occasion ; or the sophist Hippias, who boasts that all he ‘bears about him, from the sandals on his feet to the dithyrambs he carries in his hand, are his own manufacture; or Action, who will exhibit his picture of the Marriage of Alexander and Roxana—the picture which gained him no less a prize than the (laughter of the Hellanodices Praxonides; or, in an earlier age, the poet-laureate of the Olympians, Pindar himself. Lastly, as at the mediaeval tournament, there are “store of ladies whose bright eyes rain influence ;” matrons, indeed, are excluded on pain of death, but maidens, in accordance with Spartan manners, are admitted to the show.
Bouleuterion, where the presidents were sitting, and proved by witnesses that they were of pure Hellenic descent, and had no stain, religious or civil, on their character. Laying their hands on the bleeding victim, they swore that they had duly qualified themselves by ten months’ continuous training in the gymnasium, and that they would use no
fraud or guile in the sacred centests. Thence they proceeded to the stadium, where they stripped to the skin and