74 IRinos ot tbe 1lDuntiiia'»3fiel& 



Meynell, and all the best masters of the day, sought 

 eagerly for a strain of his blood. 



In the time of the first Lord Yarborough, the 

 Brocklesby country extended over the whole of the 

 South Wold, part of the Burton, and part of the North 

 Notts countries, and his lordship used to go down into 

 each of these districts for a month at a time to hunt 

 the woodlands. He used to say that when he began hunt- 

 ing there were only three or four fences between Horn- 

 castle and Brigg, a distance of thirty miles. They met 

 generally at daybreak, ' dragging up to their fox by 

 following the line of his night foraging rambles to where 

 he lay down to digest his prey.' 



The son of the first Lord Yarborough was a more 

 distinguished man than his father, alike in the world of 

 politics and of sport. A Fellow of the Royal Society, a 

 Fellow of the Society of Arts, an honorary D.C.L. of 

 Oxford, for twenty years Member of Parliament for 

 Lincolnshire, Commodore of the Royal Yacht Squadron, 

 and Master of the Brocklesby — here was a variety of 

 honours and dignities for the shoulders of one man to 

 bear ! And it was, perhaps, to enable him to bear them 

 more philosophically that Lord Melbourne raised him 

 from a baron to an earl in 1837. His reign over 

 the Brocklesby, with William Smith the First as his 

 huntsman, began, as I have told, in 18 16, when the old 

 master and the old huntsman resigned in favour of 

 their respective sons. The new blood thus infused into 

 the management worked wonders in the Brocklesby 

 kennels. In 1839 the important mandate went forth 

 that for the future the size of the largest hound on the 

 benches was not to exceed twenty-three inches, and that 

 standard has been ever since maintained. The taste for 



