ON BLOODING HOUNDS 123 



his words I must call to mind his opinion that three 

 or four succeeding days without a kill renders fox- 

 hounds visibly the worse for it. " Though," he writes, 

 "I am so great an advocate for blood as to judge it 

 necessary to a pack of hounds, yet I by no means 

 approve of it so far as it is sometimes carried. I 

 have known three young foxes chopped in a furze 

 brake in one day w^ithout any sport — a wanton 

 destruction of foxes, scarcely answering the purpose 

 of blood, since that blood does the hounds most good 

 which is most dearly earned. Such sportsmen richly 

 deserve blank days, and, without doubt, they often 

 meet with them. Mobbing a fox, indeed, is only 

 allowable when hounds are not likely to be a match 

 for him without it. Are not the foxes' heads which 

 are so pompously exposed to view often prejudicial 

 to sport in fox-hunting ? How many foxes are wan- 

 tonly destroyed, without the least service to the 

 hounds or sport to the Master that the huntsman 

 may say he has killed so many brace? How many 

 are digged out and killed, when blood is not wanted, 

 for no better reason ? — foxes that another day per- 

 haps, the earth's well stopped, might have run hours 

 and died gallantly at last ? " 



These passages, I think, do most conclusively prove 

 that Beckford cannot be charged with inhumanity, 

 and that therefore his strong advocacy of the necessity 

 of blood for hounds — if we are to expect them to show 

 us really good sport — is entitled to the strongest 

 respect, and should command our belief when we 

 know that he was a past-master of the art of hunting, 

 and that all else that he wrote has been considered 



