Hunting Ancient and Modern. 395 



financial, or commercial, who desire to hunt after reading their morning letters, and to be 

 iiome in time for the evening post or Parliamentary division, and for those iinhappil}'-constituted 

 minds to whom sport is nothing, hard zealous riding everything— a class not altogether 

 unknown to and heartily detested by the masters of fox-hounds in the best hunting counties 

 of England. 



Fox-hunting in a suitable country provides, in the course of a season, with plenty of 

 scientific sport, enough hard riding to satisfy the greatest glutton ; and even in a country 

 which is unsuitable for hard riding, if it holds a good scent, it is capable of affording 

 exquisite pleasure to real sportsmen. 



Hare-hunting in a good country affords the maximum of sport with (in a Midland 

 county sense) the minimum of hard riding. 



Englishmen have been hunters as far back as history records, and continue to hunt in 

 every country they colonise, if they can find a horse to ride and a wild animal that hounds 

 will pursue. 



The Norman liunter of deer, guided by the music of the hounds, lay in wait or galloped 

 to points in order to bring down the game with bow or spear, in the style still practised 

 with the rifle in the woods of Virginia and other States where farms are divided by forests. 



Those who now hunt in North Devon or in any mountainous and wooded county, enjoy 

 their sport as Shakespeare did more than three centuries ago. Nothing less than personal 

 experience could have inspired the noble lines of Theseus and Hippolyta in " A Midsummer 

 Night's Dream."* 



Gervase Markham, writing not quite a hundred years after Shakespeare, declares that 

 "of all the field pleasures wherewith old time and man's invention hath blest the houres 

 of our recreation, there is none to e.xcelle the delight of hunting, being compounded, like 

 an harmonious consort (concert), of all the best parts of more refined pleasures — as music, 

 dancing, running, riding, hawking, and such-like." 



England's great philosopher, John Locke, who kept two riding nags until his infirmities 

 compelled him to set up a carriage, wrote in 1660 :t — "It is man's proper business to seek 

 happiness and avoid misery. Hunting and other innocent diversions delight me, and I make 

 use of them to refresh my health, restore the vigour of my mind, and increase my pleasure; 

 but if I spend all or the greatest part of my time in them they hinder my improvement in 

 knowledge and useful arts, and give me up to a state of ignorance in which I cannot but 

 be unhappy." 



Fox-hunting is, speaking historically, the most modern of British chases. The Norman 

 gentry hunted the deer, the boar, and the wolf. The yeomanry, who had become an 

 important constituency in the time of Queen Elizabeth, hunted the hare, the martin-cat, the pole- 

 cat, and the badger. The fo.x did not rise to his present eminence as a beast of chase — sacred 

 as the Egyptian apis, except before hounds — until millions of acres of woods, moors, and 

 marshes had been converted, if not into farms, into valuable pastures and sheep-walks. 



The " riding to hounds" so essential a part of the pleasure in " the shires," is an art 

 not a hundred years old, which can only be practised in perfection where the grazing system 

 requires large grass fields and big strong fences, and practised at all where farms are en- 

 closed. 



We read in Macaulay's "History" (Vol. I., p. 311) that in the drawings of English landscapes 



* Act iv.. Scene I. t Fox Bourne's " Life of John Locke." 



