39 



Of him alone I never yet have heard 



One kindly action, one approving word. 



Sparing of cash, he ne'er outruns the bounds, 



And Suffield keeps while Gardner hunts the hounds." 



The pack here alluded to was, of course, the Quorn, 

 which Lord Southampton had given up at the end of 

 the hunting season of 1830, to be succeeded, first by 

 Squire Osbaldeston, and then by Lord Suffield. It is a 

 melancholy reflection that the deaths of Lord Wilton, 

 of Mr. Stirling Crawfurd, and Lord Gardner, have so 

 thinned the ranks of the first-flight men who flourished 

 at Melton about the time when her Majesty ascended 

 the throne that, with the exception of Mr. Little Gil- 

 mour, of Colonel Forester, and of that evergreen veteran, 

 the Eeverend Mr. Bullen,* of Eastwell, there are none 

 others now left. 



Another death has lately taken place — that of a lady 

 — which reminds us of the vast changes that English 

 fox-hunting has experienced since the day when, nearly 

 seventy years ago, the Honourable Barbara Annesley, 

 great-aunt to the present Lord Valentia, married Squire 

 Drake, of Shardeloes, who was for many years Master 

 ot the Bicester hounds. "What recollections will not 

 the decease of Mrs. Drake, in her eighty-sixth year, 

 call up in the minds of many generations of Oxford 

 undergraduates, who hunted with her husband's hounds 

 when Plancus was Consul ? Within the memory of 

 many who have scarcely passed middle age, the Peck- 

 water quadrangle at Christ Church, and the gates of nearly 

 every other College in Oxford, were alive upon a hunting 

 morning with cover hacks, upon the backs of which scores of 

 eager undergraduates proceeded to mountain order to make 



* Mr. Bullen is since dead, 1884. 



