iv INTRODUCTION 



gentleman must have been a nine days' wonder among his neighbours, 

 Beckford himself set no great store by it : when he had it printed, at Salis- 

 bury, he omitted his name from the title-page. 



Which omission invites the reflection that posterity is under no small 

 debt to the critic who dealt with the work in the Monthly Review of Sep- 

 tember, 1781. Had that critic not passed upon the book the ignorant 

 strictures which caused so much annoyance we might never have known 

 the name of the writer. Beckford might have justified his own epitaph ; 

 have died and been forgotten like others. The second edition of the 

 Thoughts was published as a direct response to the critique in the Monthly 

 Review ; the preface clearly suggests that this was its purpose, and no fewer 

 than seven footnotes are inserted in answer to the charges of cruelty; 

 moreover the third edition did not appear until 1796. This work is a 

 reprint of the fourth published in 1802. 



Having regard to our debt to that Monthly Reviewer, it may be worth 

 glancing at his pages ; they have interest of their own as throwing light 

 upon the manner in which fox-hunters and fox-hunting were regarded 

 at the time by those who knew nothing of either : 



' There appears to be so little affinity or correspondence between 

 hunting and literature upon a general comparison of the professors of 

 each, that a didactic treatise on the art of hunting was rather an unex- 

 pected acquisition ; and still more so to find the precepts delivered in 

 an easy and agreeable style. The work before us does not only come 

 from a keen sportsman but from a man of letters ; a coincidence the less 

 to be wondered at if we are justified in conjecturing his profession from 

 some hints that have escaped his pen.' 



The critic, it must be confessed, bases his conjecture that the writer 

 was a clergyman on somewhat slender grounds ; the ' hints ' to which 

 he refers are these two passages in Letter XXII: (1)'I can assure you it 

 (i.e. the ill-luck which so frequently attends fox-hunting) has provoked 

 me often and has made even a parson swear.' (2) ' It (digging out a fox) 

 put a clergyman who was present, in mind that he had a corpse to bury, 

 which otherwise had been forgotten.' It crosses one's mind that the 

 critic had a very low opinion of the attainments of country gentlemen 

 if these two remarks commended themselves as providing him with the 

 clue to a mystery otherwise insoluble. But let us see what more he has 

 to say : 



' The task of laying down some principles of hunting has thus devolved 

 upon the Writer under consideration ; and perhaps the business could 

 not have been left in better hands.' 



He proceeds to sketch the general plan and scope of the work, illus- 

 trating his remarks with well-chosen extracts, and quotes, with approval 

 of its literary quality, the author's picture of a run in Letter XIII. So far 



