CHAPTER X.
ON HUNTING.
“The sailor who rides on the ocean,
Delights when the stormy winds blow:
Wind and steam, what are they to horse motion?
Sea cheers to a land Tally-ho?
The canvas, the screw, and the paddle,
The stride of the thorough-bred hack,
When, fastened like glue to the saddle,
We gallop astern of the pack.”
Tarporley Hunt Song, 1855.
Advantage of hunting.—Libels on.—Great men who have hunted.—Popular notion unlike reality.—Dick Christian and the Marquis of Hastings.—Fallacy of “lifting” a horse refuted.—Hints on riding at fences.—Harriers discussed.—Stag-hunting a necessity and use where time an object.—Hints for novices.—Tally-ho! expounded.—To feed a horse after a hard ride.—Expenses of horse keep.—Song by Squire Warburton, “A word ere we start.”
Every man who can ride, and, living within a couple of hours’ distance of a pack of hounds, can spare a day now and then, should hunt. It will improve his horsemanship, enlarge his circle of acquaintance, as well as his tastes and sympathies, and make, as Shakspeare hath it—
“Good digestion wait on appetite, and health on both.”
Not that I mean that every horseman should attempt to follow the hounds in the first flight, or even the second; because age, nerves, weight, or other good reasons may forbid: but every man who keeps a good hack may meet his friends at cover side, enjoy the morning air, with a little pleasant chat, and follow the hounds, if not in the front, in the rear, galloping across pastures, trotting through bridle gates, creeping through gaps, and cantering along the green rides of a wood, thus causing a healthy excitement, with no painful reaction: and if, unhappily, soured or overpressed by work and anxious thoughts, drinking in such draughts of Lethe as can no otherwise be drained.
Hunting has suffered as much from overpraise as from the traditionary libels of the fribbles and fops of the time of the first Georges, when a fool, a sot, and a fox-hunter were considered synonymous terms. Of late years it has pleased a sportsman, with a wonderful talent for picturesquely describing the events of a fox-hunt, to write two sporting novels, in which all the leading characters are either fools or rogues.
“In England all conditions of men, except bishops, from ratcatchers to Royalty, are to be found in the hunting-field—equalised by horsemanship, and fraternising under the influence of a genial sport. Among fox-hunters we can trace a long line of statesmen, from William of Orange to Pitt and Fox. Lord Althorp was a master of hounds; and Lord Palmerston we have seen, within the last few years, going—as he goes everywhere—in the first flight.” This was before the French fall of the late Premier. Cromwell’s Ironsides were hunting men; Pope, the poet, writes in raptures of a gallop with the Wiltshire Harriers; and Gladstone, theologian, politician, and editor of Homer, bestrides his celebrated white mare in Nottinghamshire, and scurries along by the side of the ex-War Minister, the Duke of Newcastle.
“The progress of agriculture is indelibly associated with fox-hunting; for the three great landlords, who did more to turn sand and heath into corn and wool, and make popular the best breeds of stock and best course of cultivation—Francis, Duke of Bedford; Coke, Earl of Leicester; and the first Lord Yarborough—were all masters of hounds.
“When indecency formed the staple of our plays, and a drunken debauch formed the inevitable sequence of every dinner-party, a fool and a fox-hunter were synonymous. Squire Western was the representative of a class, which, however, was not more ridiculous than the patched, perfumed Sir Plumes, whom Hogarth painted, and Pope satirised. Fox-hunters are not a class now—roads, newspapers, and manufacturing emigration have equalised the condition of the whole kingdom; and fox-hunters are just like any other people, who wear clean shirts, and can afford to keep one or more horses.