STABLE MANAGEMENT 255 



the memory of these huntsmen, many of whose 

 names are still honoured in hunting circles, to 

 suppose that they ever wished to get drunk. Because 

 Tom Moody achieved an exaggerated degree of 

 fame, his posterity, which loves to hit below the belt 

 against fox-hunting, stigmatises the huntsmen of the 

 beginning of the century as drunkards. But where 

 and what is the evidence? So far as I have been 

 able to ascertain, it is only to be found in the works 

 of certain novelists who are supposed to have 

 portrayed in the pages of fiction the habits of the 

 period about which they wrote, and in certain 

 hunting poems of the Grub Street style of poetry. 

 The picture which Mr. Albert Smith penned of the 

 younger Arden in Christopher Tadpole, wherein he 

 turned his mother's drawing-room into a taproom 

 for the benefit of his grooms and his other sporting 

 hirelings, can only be regarded as exaggerated farce, 

 though, when it was first published, it was criticised 

 seriously as a reflection of the habits of the period. 

 The only suggestion of truth that such a picture 

 possesses is that the hospitality of the servants' hall 

 at the beginning of the century was more extended 

 than it is at the present day. When the kennels 

 were adjacent to the residence of the M.F.H. it was 

 not unusual for the huntsman and his whippers-in 

 to repair to the servants' hall after the day's work 

 had been concluded — not only in the hunting field, 

 but also in the kennels and in the stables, when they 

 were regaled with cold meat and ale. Thus upon 



