[Gutenberg 53702] • The Field Book: or, Sports and pastimes of the United Kingdom / compiled from the best authorities, ancient and modern

Excerpt from The Field Book: Or, Sports and Pastimes of the United Kingdom; Compiled From the Best Authorities, Ancient and Modern

In presenting the Field Book to the Sporting World, some explanation respecting the motives that led to its publication, are deemed necessary.

An enthusiastic admirer of rural sports from boyhood, the Compiler sought with avidity after any book connected with his favourite recreations, from which either amusement or information might be obtained. The older authors, with the exception of a few pages of quaint and curious anecdote, were generally formed of barbarous theories, whose absurdities had long since caused them to be disregarded. The more modern, whether confined to a particular subject, or professing to be repertories of British Sports, were too frequently overloaded with hackneyed and unimportant matter, and merely reprints of treatises for years before the public, and differing from their predecessors in nothing but the name.

But had there been nothing objectionable in the execution of sporting works, as they appeared during the last century, the total change in everything connected with the British field, would render them now of little value, but to point a contrast between the past and present systems.

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