ABSTRACT
The sportsman as distinguished from the mere hunter (even on the heroic and the royal scale) was largely an invention of the Renaissance and much involved with what had not yet been called "the maintenance of status. Fishermen are more likely than hunters to be thoughtful men. Perhaps that is why no hunter's book has ever been, like Walton's Compleat Angler, generally accepted as a literary classic The England of the fox hunter was, of course, also the England of poets and philosophers. That the ioimei sometimes interfered with the latter is recorded with some indignation by Bishop George Berkeley, for whom the California university town was named. Lysicles, being a nice man and a bel esprit, had an infinite contempt for the rough Manners and Conversation of Fox-hunters, and could not reflect with Patience that he had lost, as he called it, so many Hours in their Company.
