150 THE AET OF TAMING HOESES. 



Napoleon, which costs from SI. 10s. to 4Z. 4s., and can 

 be cleaned with a wet sponge in five minutes, is the 

 neatest and most economical boot — one in which tra- 

 velling does not put you under any obligation to your 

 host's servants. 



I have often found the convenience of patent leather 

 boots when staying with a party at the house of a 

 master of hounds, while others, as the hounds were 

 coming out of the kennel, were in an agony for tops 

 entrusted two or three days previously to a not-to-be- 

 found servant. In this point of the boots I differ from 

 the author of the song, quoted in the next chapter; 

 but then, squires of ten thousand a-year are not sup- 

 posed to understand the shifts of those who on a twen- 

 tieth part of that income manage to enjoy a good deal 

 of sport with all sorts of hounds and all sorts of horses. 



There is a certain class of sporting snobs who en- 

 deavour to enhance their own consequence or indulge 

 their cynical humour by talking with the utmost con- 

 tempt of any variation from the kind of hunting-dress 

 in use, in their own particular district. The best com- 

 mentary on the supercilious tailoring criticism of these 

 gents is to be found in the fact that within a century 

 every variety of hunting clothes has been in and out of 

 fashion, and that the dress in fashion Avith the Quorn 

 hunt in its most palmy days was not only the exact re- 

 verse of the present fashion in that flying country, but, 

 if comfort and convenience are to be regarded, as 

 ridiculous as brass helmets, tight stocks, and but- 

 toned-up red jackets for Indian warfare. It consisted, 

 as may be seen in old Aiken's and Sir John Dean 

 Paul's hunting sketches, of a high-crowned hat, a 

 high tight stock, a tight dress coat, with narrow skirts 

 that could protect neither the chest, stomach, or thighs, 



