INTRODUCTION 



IX 



hounds, at the smack of a whip '), and saved the hare alive if he could 

 do it. Some hare hunters, as we learn from William Elaine (whose Essays 

 on Hunting, by the way, appeared in 1781, the year in which the Thoughts 

 first saw the light), considered the killing of the hare ' necessary to complete 

 the sport,' but we can well imagine that Beckford had in mind the more 

 usual indifference whether the hare were killed or not when he insisted 

 on the necessity of blood for fox-hounds. ' Such methods,' we may 

 suppose him saying to himself, ' answer very well in hare-hunting, but I 

 must make it very plain that they will not do in fox-hunting.' 



That Beckford had still something to learn concerning the manage- 

 ment of hounds is shown in Letter V : 'I am in doubt whether it might 

 not be better to breed them up yourself, and have a large kennel on purpose,' 

 as an alternative to sending puppies out to walk. The idea of attempting 

 to rear all the year's whelps at kennels has long been abandoned. 



He seems to have had no difficulty in finding walks but, like Masters 

 ever since, he suffered heavy losses from distemper while the whelps were 

 at walk, owing, as he concluded, to lack of care. In this conclusion he 

 may have been wrong : distemper takes terribly heavy toll of young hounds 

 in these days, and appears to discriminate little between puppies that 

 are well cared for and puppies that are not. 



At the particular time he wrote the disease ' seems happily to be 

 now on the decline : at least is less frequent and more mild, and probably 

 in time may be entirely removed.' Alas ! The disease has always been 

 with us, sometimes in more virulent form, sometimes in less : of recent 

 years its ravages in many parts of the country have been worse than the 

 longest experience can remember, some hunts losing from fifty to eighty 

 per cent, of the puppies sent out to walk. Notwithstanding the progress 

 of science and veterinary knowledge, we are as helpless in coping with the 

 disease as was Beckford ; we know that highly bred dogs of all breeds are 

 more susceptible to it than mongrels, but beyond that unsatisfactory know- 

 ledge, we are nearly as much in the dark as they were in 1781. 



Hydrophobia was a terrible scourge at that period ; its prevalence 

 was attributed to the numbers of ownerless dogs that roamed about the 

 country. It is worth noticing that though Beckford has a good deal to 

 say on this subject he makes no mention of ' worming,' an operation 

 approved from the time of Pliny to within living memory. Nor was Beck- 

 ford a stranger to kennel lameness and mange. 



The practice of breeding foxes in ' courts ' was then a usual one. In this 

 regard modern fox-hunting shows an improvement ; the artificial rearing of 

 foxes flourished side by side with the system of hunting ' bagmen,' which 

 continued until the nineteenth century was far advanced. The result was 

 regular traffic in foxes with all its attendant evils, troubles with fox-stealers, 



with neighbours, and, not least, with mange. If a bagman be turned out 



b 



