CHAPTER XIV 



VARIETY IN HUNTING COUNTRIES 



The late Mr. George Lane Fox, one of the great pillars 

 of the chase in the nineteenth century, whose love of 

 real fox-hunting was hardly equalled by any of his 

 great contemporaries, used to be rather severe upon 

 those who forsook their own county hounds and went 

 to what Mr. Jorrocks called the " Cut-me-downs " for 

 their sport ; and Whyte-Melville, who thoroughly 

 sympathised with the great M.F.H. in this matter — in 

 principle, at least, if he did not carry it out in prac- 

 tice — expresses it delightfully in the pages of Market 

 Harborough. " After all," he writes, " notwithstand- 

 ing her irresistible attractions, we cannot follow Diana 

 every day of our lives, and surely it is wiser and 

 pleasanter to take her as we want her amongst our 

 own woods and glades and breezy uplands, and 

 pleasant shady nooks, than to go all the way to 

 Ephesus on purpose to worship with the crowd. 

 Mixed motives, however, seem to be the springs that 

 set in motion our human frames, and if Care sits 

 behind the horseman on the cantle of his saddle, 

 Ambition may also be detected clinging somewhere 

 about his spurs." 



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