8o THE ESSEX FOXHOUNDS. 



they stood his heavy road work better than those 

 which commonly find favour with masters. Size was 

 also a great point with him, and his 25-inch hounds, 

 fairly swept like a hurricane, from scent to view, 

 into their fox over the Roothings. For Beauty and 

 Bashful, both bred by Mr. Conyers from the Lonsdale 

 blood, he refused 100 guineas from Mr. Assheton Smith. 

 This valuable pack was kept at Copt Hall, in kennels 

 so damp and cramped as to leave but a bare possibility of 

 keeping them in anything like a state to pull down an 

 Essex fox. The position of the kennels, too, was most 

 inconvenient. From Copt Hall the distance to the fixtures 

 in the northern part of the county is twenty to thirty 

 miles. Yet even to these distant places the hounds were 

 not vanned, nor did Mr. Conyers, like many masters of 

 old time, who hunted a wide area of country, have any 

 outlying kennels. The Squire did not spare himself. He 

 would ride upwards of sixty miles to covert and home, and 

 after hunting would often drive up to London ; he was 

 "fond of hearing the debates in the House," he said, 

 though in 1830 he sustained a crushing defeat on 

 standing for the county against his fellow Tory, Mr. 

 Thomas Gardiner Bramston. In the course of this 

 memorable contest the " Nonconformist conscience " 



