I cannot resist the temptation of
contemplating this analogy, which, I think, he might have carried
further, very much to the advantage of his argument. He might have
shown, that these "hunters, whose game is man," have many sports
analogous to our own. As we drown whelps and kittens, they amuse
themselves, now and then, with sinking a ship, and stand round the
fields of Blenheim, or the walls of Prague, as we encircle a cockpit. As
we shoot a bird flying, they take a man in the midst of his business or
pleasure, and knock him down with an apoplexy. Some of them, perhaps,
are virtuosi, and delight in the operations of an asthma, as a human
philosopher in the effects of the air-pump. To swell a man with a
tympany is as good sport as to blow a frog. Many a merry bout have these
frolick beings at the vicissitudes of an ague, and good sport it is to
see a man tumble with an epilepsy, and revive and tumble again, and all
this he knows not why. As they are wiser and more powerful than we, they
have more exquisite diversions; for we have no way of procuring any
sport so brisk and so lasting, as the paroxysms of the gout and stone,
which, undoubtedly, must make high mirth, especially if the play be a
little diversified with the blunders and puzzles of the blind and deaf.
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