Stick to him till he does what you require, trusting, nevertheless, rather to time than violence, and if you can get him at last to obey you of his own free will, without knowing why, I cannot repeat too often, you will have won the most conclusive of victories.
When the late Sir Charles Knightley took Sir Marinel out of training, and brought him down to Pytchley, to teach him the way he should go (and the way of Sir Charles over a country was that of a bird in the air), he found the horse restive, ignorant, wilful, and unusually averse to learning the business of a hunter. The animal, was, however, well worth a little painstaking, and his owner, a perfect centaur in the saddle, rode him out for a lesson in jumping the first day the hounds remained in the kennel. At two o’clock, as his old friend and contemporary, Mr. John Cooke informed me, he came back, having failed to get the rebel over a single fence. “But I have told them not to take his saddle off,” said Sir Charles, sitting down to a cutlet and a glass of Madeira, “after luncheon I mean to have a turn at him again!”
So the baronet remounted and took the lesson up where he had left off. Nerve, temper, patience, the strongest seat, and the finest hands in England, could not but triumph at last, and this thorough-bred pair came home at dinner-time, having larked over all the stiffest fences in the country, with perfect unanimity and good will. Sir Marinel, and Benvolio, also a thorough-bred horse, were by many degrees, Sir Charles has often told me, the best hunters he ever had.
Shuttlecock too, immortalized in the famous Billesdon-Coplow poem, when
“Villiers esteemed it a serious bore,
That no longer could Shuttlecock fly as before,”
was a clean thorough-bred horse, fast enough to have made a good figure on the race-course, but with a rooted disinclination to jump.
That king of horsemen, the grandfather of the present Lord Jersey, whom I am proud to remember having seen ride fairly away from a whole Leicestershire field, over a rough country not far from Melton, at seventy-three, told me that this horse, though it turned out eventually one of his safest and boldest fencers, at the end of six weeks’ tuition would not jump the leaping-bar the height of its own knees! His lordship, however, who was blessed in perfection, with the sweet temper, as with the personal beauty and gallant bearing of his race, neither hurried nor ill-used it, and the time spent on the animal’s education, though somewhat wearisome, was not thrown away.
Mr. Gilmour’s famous Vingt-et-un, the best hunter, he protests, by a great deal that gentleman ever possessed, was quite thorough-bred. Seventeen hands high, but formed all over in perfect proportion to this commanding frame, it may easily be imagined that the power and stride of so large an animal made light of ordinary obstacles, and I do not believe, though it may sound an extravagant assertion, there was a fence in the whole of Leicestershire that could have stopped Vingt-et-un and his rider, on a good scenting day some few years ago. Such men and such horses ought never to grow old.
Mr. William Cooke, too, owned a celebrated hunter called Advance, of stainless pedigree, as was December, so named from being foaled on the last day of that month, a premature arrival that lost him his year for racing purposes by twenty-four hours, and transferred the colt to the hunting-stables. Mr. Cooke rode nothing but this class, nor indeed could any animal less speedy than a race-horse, sustain the pace he liked to go.
Whitenose, a beautiful animal that the late Sir Richard Sutton affirmed was not only the best hunter he ever owned, but that he ever saw or heard of, and on whose back he is painted in Sir F. Grant’s spirited picture of the Cottesmore Meet, was also quite thorough-bred. When Sir Richard hunted the Burton country, Whitenose carried him through a run so severe in pace and of such long duration, that not another horse got to the end, galloping, his master assured me, steadily on without a falter, to the last. By the way, he was then of no great age, and nearer sixteen hands than fifteen-two! This was a very easy horse to ride, and could literally jump anything he got his nose over. A picture to look at, with a coat like satin, the eyes of a deer, and the truest action in his slow as in his fast paces, he has always been my ideal of perfection in a hunter.