3-028-527 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Months: a deer park in July, 1871. 'Nothing is more English than the extensive park of grass and trees...in which a herd of fallow-deer are kept for the sake of their beauty, while a portion of the ground is sometimes used for the pasture of oxen or sheep. The mighty trunk of the old beech-tree, half-despoiled of its branches and foliage...might bear record of many romantic incidents...these graceful animals, which drink of the clear pool and crop the fresh green blade, as they rove through the ferny covert and across the open lawns...owe their preservation to the continuance of social rank, and of territorial property, in the line of hereditary descent. Whatever may be the economic results of the customs regarding primogeniture and the entail of estates, it is probable that their legislative abolition would soon destroy these noble and agreeable features of rural England. The magnificent old timber would be cut down and sold;...the squirrel, the pheasant, the jay, and the stock-dove would be exterminated...Such is the reflection suggested by the sight of an English deer-park, if one happens to be addicted to political meditations instead of zoology, and to the annals of the past and visions of the future in our social life'. From "Illustrated London News", 1871.