INTEODUCTION 



It is an accepted fact in that extensive and entertaining field, the 

 annals of sporting literature, that the first and foremost of all sporting 

 writers — in himself the pioneer and creator of this ingenious order 

 of the literature and annals of the Chase — was the " illustrious top- 

 sawyer," as the immortal Jorrocks has described him, " Mr. ilapper- 

 ley-Nimrod," otherwise the " great original " Charles James Apperley, 

 who brought his brilliant abilities as a keenly thorough and all- 

 observing sportsman, with his scholarly faculties as an accomplished 

 scribe, to the illumination of the spirited branch for which he 

 personally must be held so largely responsible. Of all the gifted 

 Nimrod's profuse contributions to the history of the sport he loved 

 devoutly and understood so entirely, the very cream of his contri- 

 butions — as the self-appointed historian of the Hunting Field — 

 must pre-eminently l)e realized in his earlier " Letters on Hunting," 

 first contributed, under the famous pseudonym of " Nimkod," to the 

 pages of the Sporting Magazine, starting early in the years of grace 

 1821-1826. At that time the historical veterans of the Chase, for the 

 most part, were more than mere traditions of the noble science ; and 

 the great sporting delineator in person was admitted to the inestimable 

 advantage of actually " studying from the life " the illustrious heroes 

 who have pre-eminently fostered the sporting supremacy of Old 

 England, and whose names are recognized as the sponsors for all 

 that was greatest, most heroic, and worthiest of preservation in the 

 palmy days of past sport. 



" Nimrod " was in himself unique as " the first of sporting chroni- 

 clers," and, further, in his luck in living in times when the illustrious 

 worthies who raised Fox- Hunting to this high perfection of sport 

 were still there to be seen in the hunting-field, and alike at their own 



