CHAPTER XII 



GORSE COVERTS AND THEIR MANAGEMENT 



"Oh, how they bustled round him! 

 How merrily they found him ; 

 And how stealthily they wound him, 

 Through each dingle and each dell 1 " 



Taking Squire Western as their type, it has been the 

 fashion for many writers, ever since the days of 

 Fielding, to speak of fox-hunters as of beings who 

 were dead to all sense of beauty, poetry, or imagina- 

 tion. Somerville, however, was a Master of Hounds, 

 as " Cecil " has found out for us, and that true poet, 

 Charles Kingsley, was a sportsman to the backbone ; 

 while Whyte-Melville has somewhere written that 

 " there is something of poetry in every man who 

 rides hard across a country." 



There was the very quintessence of sport in the 

 doings of our ancestors, though their skulls were 

 adorned with the unpoetic pigtail ; in their early 

 hours, in their quest for the drag of a travelling fox, 

 and their keen appreciation of the beauties of the 

 dawning day, which have all been so admirably de- 

 scribed by Somerville in his famous poem. And it 



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