I started to meet Lord Yarborough’s hounds, from the house of a friend, on a capital Wold pony for cover hack. It used to be said, before non-riding masters of hounds had broadcasted bridle-gates over the Quorn country, that a Leicestershire hack was a pretty good hunter for other counties. We may say the same of a Lincolnshire Wolds pony—his master, farming not less than three hundred and more likely fifteen hundred acres, has no time to lose in crawling about on a punchy half-bred cart-horse, like a smock-frocked tenant—the farm must be visited before hunting, and the market-towns lie too far off for five miles an hour jog-trot to suit. It is the Wold fashion to ride farming at a pretty good pace, and take the fences in a fly where the gate stands at the wrong corner of the field. Broad strips of turf fringe the road, offering every excuse for a gallop, and our guide continually turned through a gate or over a hurdle, and through half a dozen fields, to save two sides of an angle. These fields contrast strangely with the ancient counties—large, and square, and clean, with little ground lost in hedgerows. The great cop banks of Essex, Devon, and Cheshire are almost unknown—villages you scarcely see, farmhouses rarely from the roadside, for they mostly stand well back in the midst of their acres. Gradually creeping up the Wold—passing through, here vast turnip-fields, fed over by armies of long-woolled Lincoln sheep; there, stubble yielding before from a dozen to a score of pair-horse ploughs, silent witnesses of the scale of Lincolnshire farming—at length we see descending and winding along a bridle-road before us, the pied pack and the gleam of the huntsman’s scarlet. Around, from every point of the compass the “field” come ambling, trotting, cantering, galloping, on hacks, on hunters, through gates or over fences, practising their Yorkshire four-year-olds. There are squires of every degree, Lincolnshire M.P.’s, parsons in black, in number beyond average; tenant-farmers, in quantity and quality such as no other county we have ever seen can boast, velvet-capped and scarlet-coated, many with the Brocklesby hunt button, mounted on first-class hunters, whom it was a pleasure to see them handle; and these were not young bloods, outrunning the constable, astonishing their landlords and alarming their fathers; but amongst the ruck were respectable grandfathers who had begun hunting on ponies when Stubbs was painting great-grandfather Smith, and who had as a matter of course brought up their sons to follow the line in which they had been cheered on by Arthur Young’s Lord Yarborough. There they were, of all ages, from the white-haired veteran who could tell you when every field had been inclosed, to the little petticoated orphan boy on a pony, “whose father’s farm had been put in trust for him by the good Earl.”
Of the ordinary mob that crowd fox-hound meets from great cities and fashionable watering-places, there were none. The swell who comes out to show his clothes and his horse; the nondescript, who may be a fast Life-Guardsman or a fishmonger; the lot of horse-dealers; and, above all, those blasé gentlemen who, bored with everything, openly express their preference for a carted deer or red-herring drag, if a straight running fox is not found in a quarter of an hour after the hounds are thrown into cover. The men who ride on the Lincolnshire Wolds are all sportsmen, who know the whole country as well as their own gardens, and are not unfrequently personally acquainted with the peculiar appearance and habits of each fox on foot. Altogether they are as formidable critics as any professional huntsman would care to encounter.
There is another pleasant thing. In consequence, perhaps, of the rarity, strangers are not snubbed as in some counties; and you have no difficulty in getting information to any extent on subjects agricultural and fox-hunting (even without that excellent passport which I enjoyed of a hunter from the stables of the noble Master of the Hounds), and may be pretty sure of more than one hospitable and really-meant invitation in the course of the return ride when the sport is ended.
But time is up, and away we trot—leaving the woods of Limber for the present—to one of the regular Wolds, artificial coverts, a square of gorse of several acres, surrounded by a turf bank and ditch, and outside again by fields of the ancient turf of the moorlands. In go the hounds at a word, without a straggler; and while they make the gorse alive with their lashing sterns, there is no fear of our being left behind for want of seeing which way they go, for there is neither plantation nor hedge, nor hill of any account to screen us. And there is no fear either of the fox being stupidly headed, for the field all know their business, and are fully agreed, as old friends should be, on the probable line.
A very faint Tally-away, and cap held up, by a fresh complexioned, iron-gray, bullet-headed old gentleman, of sixteen stone, mounted on a four-year-old, brought the pack out in a minute from the far end of the covert, and we were soon going, holding hard, over a newly-ploughed field, looking out sharp for the next open gate; but it is at the wrong corner, and by the time we have reached the middle of fifty acres, a young farmer in scarlet, sitting upright as a dart, showed the way over a new rail in the middle of a six-foot quickset. Our nag, “Leicestershire,” needs no spurring, but takes it pleasantly, with a hop, skip, and jump; and by the time we had settled into the pace on the other side, the senior on the four-year-old was alongside, crying, “Push along, sir; push along, or they’ll run clean away from you. The fences are all fair on the line we’re going.” And so they were—hedges thick, but jumpable enough, yet needing a hunter nevertheless, especially as the big fields warmed up the pace amazingly; and, as the majority of the farmers out were riding young ones destined for finished hunters in the pasture counties, there was above an average of resolution in the style of going at the fences. The ground almost all plough, naturally drained by chalk sub-subsoil, fortunately rode light; but presently we passed the edge of the Wolds, held on through some thin plantations over the demesne grass of a squire’s house, then on a bit of unreclaimed heath, where a flock of sheep brought us to a few minutes’ check. With the help of a veteran of the hunt, who had been riding well up, a cast forward set us agoing again, and brought us, still running hard, away from the Wolds to low ground of new inclosures, all grass, fenced in by ditch and new double undeniable rails. As we had a good view of the style of country from a distance, we thought it wisest, as a stranger, on a strange horse, with personally a special distaste to double fences, to pull gently, and let half-a-dozen young fellows on half-made, heavy-weight four or five years old, go first. The results of this prudent and unplucky step were most satisfactory; while two or three, with a skill we admired, without venturing to imitate, went the “in and out” clever, the rest, some down and some blundering well over, smashed at least one rail out of every two, and let the “stranger” through comfortably at a fair flying jump. After three or four of these tremendous fields, each about the size of Mr. Mechi’s farm, a shepherd riding after his flock on a pony opened a gate just as the hounds, after throwing up their heads for a minute, turned to the right, and began to run back to the Wolds at a slower rate than we started, for the fox was no doubt blown by the pace; and so up what are called hills there (they would scarcely be felt in Devonshire or Surrey), we followed at a hand gallop right up to the plantations of Brocklesby Park, and for a good hour the hounds worked him round and round the woods, while we kept as near them as we could, racing along green rides as magnificent in their broad spread verdures and overhanging evergreen walls of holly and laurel as any Watteau ever painted. The Lincolnshire gentry and yeomanry, scarlet coated and velvet capped, on their great blood horses sweeping down one of the grand evergreen avenues of Brocklesby Park, say toward the Pelham Pillar, is a capital untried subject, in colour, contrast, and living interest, for an artist who can paint men as well as horses.
At length when every dodge had been tried, Master Reynard made a bolt in despair. We raced him down a line of fields of very pretty fencing to a small lake, where wild ducks squatted up, and there ran into him, after a fair although not a very fast day’s sport: a more honest hunting, yet courageous dashing pack we never rode to. The scarcity of villages, the general sparseness of the population, the few roads, and those almost all turf-bordered, and on a level with the fields, the great size of the enclosures, the prevalence of light arable land, the nuisance of flocks of sheep, and yet a good scenting country, are the special features of the Wolds. When you leave them and descend, there is a country of water, drains, and deep ditches, that require a real water-jumper. Two points specially strike a stranger—the complete hereditary air of the pack, and the attendants, so different from the piebald, new-varnished appearance of fashionable subscription packs. Smith, the huntsman, is fourth in descent of a line of Brocklesby huntsmen; Robinson, the head groom, had just completed his half century of service at Brocklesby; and Barnetby, who rode Lord Yarborough’s second horse, was many years in the same capacity with the first Earl. But, after all, the Brocklesby tenants—the Nainbys, the Brookes, the Skipwiths, and other Woldsmen, names “whom to mention would take up too much room,” as the “Eton Grammar” says—tenants who, from generation to generation, have lived, and flourished, and hunted under the Pelham family—a spirited, intelligent, hospitable race of men—these alone are worth travelling from Land’s End to see, to hear, to dine with; to learn from their sayings and doings what a wise, liberal, resident landlord—a lover of field sports, a promoter of improved agriculture—can do in the course of generations toward “breeding” a first-class tenantry, and feeding thousands of townsfolk from acres that a hundred years ago only fed rabbits. We should recommend those M.P.’s who think fox-hunting folly, to leave their books and debates for a day’s hunting on the Wolds. We think it will be hard to obtain such happy results from the mere pen-and-ink regulations of chamber legislators and haters of field sports. Three generations of the Pelhams turned thousands of acres of waste in heaths and Wolds into rich farm-land; the fourth did his part by giving the same district railways and seaport communication. When we find learned mole-eyed pedants sneering at fox-hunters, we may call the Brocklesby kennels and the Pelham Pillar as witnesses on the side of the common sense of English field sports. It was hunting that settled the Pelhams in a remote country and led them to colonise a waste.
There is one excellent custom at the hunting-dinners at Brocklesby Park which we may mention, without being guilty of intrusion on private hospitality. At a certain hour the stud-groom enters and says, “My Lord, the horses are bedded up;” then the whole party rise, make a procession through the stables, and return to coffee in the drawing-room. This custom was introduced by the first Lord Yarborough some half-century ago, in order to break through the habit of late sitting over wine that then was too prevalent.
HARRIERS—ON THE BRIGHTON DOWNS.
Long before hunting sounds are to be heard, except the early morning cub-hunters routing woodlands, and the autumn stag-hunters of Exmoor, harrier packs are hard at work racing down and up the steep hillside and along the chalky valleys of Brighton Downs, preparing old sportsmen for the more earnest work of November—training young ones into the meaning of pace, the habit of riding fast down, and the art of climbing quickly, yet not too quickly, up hill—giving constitutional gallops to wheezy aldermen, or enterprizing adults fresh from the riding-school—affording fun for fast young ladies and pleasant sights for a crowd of foot-folks and fly-loads, halting on the brows of the steep combs, content with the living panorama.
The Downs and the sea are the redeeming features of Brighton, considered as a place of change and recreation for the over-worked of London. Without these advantages one might quite as well migrate from the City to Regent Street, varying the exercise by a stroll along the Serpentine. To a man who needs rest there is something at first sight truly frightful in the townish gregariousness of Brighton proper, with its pretentious common-place architecture, and its ceaseless bustle and rolling of wheels. But then comes into view first the sea, stretching away into infinite silence and solitude, dotted over on sunny days with pleasure-boats; and next, perpetually dashing along the league of sea-borded highway, group after group of gay riding-parties of all ages and both sexes—Spanish hats, feathers, and riding-habits—amazones, according to the French classic title, in the majority. First comes Papa Briggs, with all his progeny, down to the little bare-legged imitation Highlander on a shaggy Shetland pony; then a riding-master in mustachios, boots, and breeches, with a dozen pupils in divers stages of timidity and full-blown temerity; and then again loving pairs in the process of courtship or the ecstasies of the honeymoon, pacing or racing along, indifferent to the interest and admiration that such pairs always excite. Besides the groups there are single figures, military and civil, on prancing thorough-bred hacks and solid weight-carrying cobs, contrasted with a great army of hard-worked animals, at half-a-crown an hour which compose the bulk of the Brighton cavalry, for horse-hiring at Brighton is the rule, private possession the exception; nowhere else, except, perhaps, at Oxford, is the custom so universal, and nowhere do such odd, strange people venture to exhibit themselves “a-horseback.” As Dublin is said to be the car-drivingest, so is Brighton the horse-ridingest city in creation; and it is this most healthy, mental and physical exercise, with the summer-sea yacht excursions, which constitute the difference and establishes the superiority of this marine offshoot of London over any foreign bathing-place. Under French auspices we should have had something infinitely more magnificent, gay, gilded, and luxurious in architecture, in shops, in restaurants, cafés, theatres, and ball-rooms; but pleasure-boat sails would have been utterly unknown, and the horse-exercise confined to a few daring cavaliers and theatrical ladies.