COLONEL JOHN COOK's DEATH. 67 



Little remains to be told of the life of the author. 

 Game to the last, he never lost his love for huntino-, and 

 in 1828, just a year before his death, though suffering 

 much from cancer, he returned to England, and at the 

 invitation of his old friend, Mr. Samuel Nicoll, Master of 

 the New Forest Hounds, took the management of that 

 pack while Mr. Nicoll was absent in consequence of a 

 tragic occurrence in his family. Out of practice as he was, 

 he hunted the pack and delighted everyone with the sport 

 he .showed. This, however, was his last who-whoop. 

 Unable any longer to struggle against his malady, he 

 returned to Rouen, and wrote to a friend in one of his 

 almost illegible scrawls : " I am fairly hunted down and run 

 to ground by a damned hungry and incurable cancer under 

 the tongue." And so the poor fellow was ; his tongue 

 came away in pieces, and in December, 1829, he died at 

 Rouen at the age of fifty-six. 



The Sporting Magazine thus describes him : — 

 " He was a man of eccentric manners and habits, 

 ridiculing, in fact almost despising, those effeminating 

 habits both in manners and dress which now form certainly 

 too great a part of the character of our modern dandy and 

 foxhunter. They who fancied that Cook was nothing but 

 a groom — that his knowledge was confined entirely to the 



