" Hi haro / FoRRARD ! " 407 



Childe, of Kinlet, Shropshire (tlie "Flying Childc"), introduced what is called the Leicestershire 

 style of riding up to the liounds, and flying the fences as they came. This system was at once 

 adopted in the adjoining hunts of the Bclvoir, the Cottesmore, the Pytchley, and thence 

 spread through every hunting district of England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, where the 

 fields were level and large enough to gallop in, and the fences jumpable and required to be 

 jumped. 



George Morland's hunting pictures give a very good idea of the old style, for he was 

 essentially a realist. 



" Ere Blue Cap and Wanton taught fox-hounds to skurry, 



With music in plenty. Oh, where was the hurry — 



When each nag wore a crupper, each squire a pig-tail ; 



When our toast, 'The Brown Forest,' was drunk in brown ale?" 



With demi-pique saddles, the old school galloped standing up in their stirrups, holding 

 on with a single snaffle bridle, and made their half-bred nags take, after first pulling up, 

 stiles that could not be avoided and gates that could not be opened. 



Ralph Lambton, uncle of the first Earl of Durham, of a family which had lived on their 

 estates from Saxon times, member for his county, a most refined gentleman, was one of Mr. 

 Meynell's earliest and best pupils. He carried the manners and customs of the great fox- 

 hunting reformer into the North, and was long master of one of the best packs of fox-hounds 

 in England. Durham had not then been honeycombed with coal-pits and gridironed with 

 railways. He used to cheer his hounds with, "Hi haro! Forrard ! Hi haro!" a Norman 

 hunting cry, not known since in England, but which is still heard in France when represen- 

 tatives of the old nobility in Bretagne are hunting boar or wolf, or leading a charge with 

 bayonets, as at Inkermann. 



In Durham flourished one of the first of the hard-thrusting riders, the Earl of Darlington, 

 Master of the Raby Hounds, celebrated in a song the heroes of which are forgotten, and 

 nothing interesting to the present generation remains except the Irish chorus — 



" Lately passing o'er Barnsdale, I happened to spy 

 A fox stealing on with the hounds in full cry ; 

 'Tis Darlington, sure, for his voice I well know, 

 Crying, ' Forward, hark forward !' for Skelbrook below. 

 With my Ballymoonora, the hounds of old Raby for me I" 



Of the local heroes described in this and many once celebrated hunting-songs like the Billesden 

 Coplow, the Cheshire, and other ballads, one may say with Sir Walter Scott's harper — 



" Their bones are dust, their spurs are rust, 

 Their souls are with the saints, we trust." 



Of three packs of hounds still hunted under difficulties in Durham, the Raby country is alone 

 worthy of Durham's ancient reputation. 



Lord Sefton succeeded Mr. Meynell in the Mastership of the Quorn. He was more of a 

 bon vivant, a politician, and a man of fashion, than a sportsman, but he, too, was a reformer 

 of the hunting-field. He improved Mr. Childe's flying style of riding by introducing a second 

 hunter, to be ridden judiciously by a light weight as near the line of hounds but with as 

 little jumping as possible, so as to aff'ord him a relay the moment the hounds checked, if, as 

 was usually the case with his twenty-stone weight, his first horse was pumped out ; this luxury 

 in the direction of humanity has since become universal in all "flying" as distinguished from 



