Looking back at the manner in which fox-hunting has grown up with our habits and customs, and increased in the number of packs, number of hunting days, and number of horsemen, in full proportion with wealth and population, one cannot help being amused at the simplicity with which Mrs. Beecher Stowe, who comes from a country where people seldom amuse themselves out of doors (except in making money), tells in her “Sunny Memories,” how, when she dined with Lord John Russell, at Richmond, the conversation turned on hunting; and she expressed her astonishment “that, in the height of English civilisation, this vestige of the savage state should remain.” “Thereupon they only laughed, and told stories about fox-hunters.” They might have answered with old Gervase Markham, “Of all the field pleasures wherewith Old Time and man’s inventions hath blessed the hours of our recreations, there is none so excellent as the delight of hunting, being compounded like an harmonious concert of all the best partes of most refined pleasures, as music, dancing, running and ryding.”
Mrs. Stowe’s distinguished countryman, Washington Irving, took a sounder view of our rural pleasures; for he says in his charming “Sketch Book:”—
“The fondness for rural life among the higher classes of the English has had a great and salutary effect upon national character. I do not know a finer race of men than the English gentlemen. Instead of the softness and effeminacy which characterizes the men of rank of most countries, they exhibit a union of elegance and strength, of robustness of frame and freshness of complexion, which I am inclined to attribute to their living so much in the open air, pursuing so eagerly the invigorating recreations of the country.”
[213-*] I think this is a mistake. In a copy of the rules forwarded to me by a Cheshire squire, one of the hereditary members of the club, it is a pair of gloves. But in the notes, the songs and ballads by R. Egerton Warburton, Esq., of Arley Hall, it is printed “breeches.”
CHAPTER XIV.
THE WILD PONIES OF EXMOOR.
In England there are so few wild horses, that the following description of a visit I made to Exmoor a few years ago in the month of September, may be doubly interesting, since Mr. Rarey has shown a short and easy method of dealing with the principal produce of that truly wild region.
The road from South Molton to Exmoor is a gradual ascent over a succession of hills, of which each descent, however steep, leads to a still longer ascent, until you reach the high level of Exmoor. The first six miles are through real Devonshire lanes; on each side high banks, all covered with fern and grass, and topped with shrubs and trees; for miles we were hedged in with hazels, bearing nuts with a luxuriance wonderful to the eyes of those accustomed to see them sold at the corners of streets for a penny the dozen. In spring and summer, wild flowers give all the charms of colour to these game-preserving hedgerows; but a rainy autumn had left no colour among the rich green foliage, except here and there a pyramid of the bright red berries of the mountain ash.
So, up hill and down dale, over water-courses—now merrily trotting, anon descending, and not less merrily trudging up, steep ascents—we proceed by a track as sound as if it had been under the care of a model board of trustees—for the simple reason that it rested on natural rock. We pushed along at an average rate of some six miles an hour, allowing for the slow crawling up hills; passing many rich fields wherein fat oxen of the Devon breed calmly grazed, with sheep that had certainly not been bred on mountains. Once we passed a deserted copper-mine; which, after having been worked for many years, had at length failed, or grown unprofitable, under the competition of the richer mines of Cuba and South Australia. A long chimney, peering above deserted cottages, and a plentiful crop of weeds, was the sole monument of departed glories—in shares and dividends—and mine-captain’s promises.