FOX-HUNTING AND ITS FUTURE 



A little later, subscriptions, which had hitherto been 

 few and intermittent, came into vogue, and, towards 

 the thirties, hunting in most parts of England had 

 assumed the system and character it now holds. 

 Market Harborough, Melton Mowbray, Leamington, 

 and other centres of hunting became fashionable, and 

 the fields of sportsmen began to assume at the more 

 favourite meets very considerable proportions. Packs 

 of hounds now began to be divided into two classes — 

 those maintained by subscription, and those carried on 

 at the expense of the nobility and a few of the richer 

 squires. During the eighteenth century many of the 

 nobility had been in the habit of maintaining hounds 

 at their own expense. These, although numerically more 

 important than the small, rough packs of which Somer- 

 vile's primitive establishment was typical, were, com- 

 pared with the packs introduced by Warde and his 

 co-reformers, very inferior. As the pomp and panoply 

 of the chase became more carefully organised and 

 developed, the kennels of the great landed aristocracy 

 underwent, too, a complete transformation, and their 

 establishments presently became famous throughout 

 Europe for the magnificence of their equipment and 

 the hunting powers of the hounds maintained. The 

 Belvoir, the Duke of Grafton's, the Badminton, Lord 

 Fitzwilliam's, the Goodwood, the Duke of Buccleugh's, 

 the Earl of Eglinton's, Lord Portsmouth's, Lord 

 Leconfield's, and other well-known packs, are among 

 the great establishments of this kind which sportsmen of 

 this generation will at once recall. It is one of the great 

 misfortunes of rural England in these days that, thanks 

 to the depression in agriculture, so many of these famous 

 proprietary packs have had, one by one, to be aban- 

 doned by the great families, which, at their own expense, 

 had so long and so generously maintained them. 



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