THE FATHERS OF FOX-HUNTING. 



If Nimrod, that ' mighty hunter before the Lord,' could 

 revisit the glimpses of the moon, and drop into England 

 in November, he would doubtless view with suprem- 

 est contempt the sport which we in these latter days 

 are pleased to call hunting. All this elaborate pre- 

 paration, all this excitement, all this vast expenditure on 

 horse flesh, all these grandly bred hounds, with no 

 better object than chasing a little stinking vermin-beast 

 from one hole to another ! The lion, the boar, the stag 

 — these, indeed, were quarry worthy of a hunter. But the 

 fox ! The hunting instinct must have sunk low indeed 

 in man, he would have said, if it can be gratified by the 

 chase of such a paltry creature as this. 



And, from that point of view, there is at first sight 

 something odd in the fact that the term ' hunting.' in Great 

 Britain and Ireland has come to be almost exclusively 

 applied to the chase of the fox. There are stag-hunting, 

 of course, and otter-hunting, and hare-hunting, but they 

 are dwarfed into insignificance by comparison with the 

 supremacy of fox-hunting. 



How was it, then, that the fox became such an object 

 of reverence among English sportsmen and usurped the 



A 



