NATURE AND SPORT IN BRITAIN 



Seasons), the Earl of Halifax, and General Stanhope. 

 In 1727 he issued a volume of Occasional Poems. None 

 of these efforts, although no doubt they secured to him 

 a measure of consideration among his friends and 

 acquaintances, seem to have contributed at all towards 

 the high popularity afterwards attained by him. In 

 1735, however, appeared The Chace : A Poem. ''Its 

 success was immediate," writes Mr. R. Farquharson 

 Sharp, in an interesting memoir of the hunter-poet, 

 prefacing an excellent edition of this poem published 

 in 1896. "A second and third edition appeared in the 

 same year as the first; a fourth and a fifth in 1757 ; a 

 sixth in 1773, and another, with Bewick's illustrations, 

 in 1796; and during the first half of the present century 

 (the nineteenth)," continues Mr. Sharp, "the poem was 

 frequently reprinted." The first illustrator of The 

 Chace was Thomas Bewick ; the latest is Mr. Hugh 

 Thomson, whose charming old-world drawings enrich 

 the 1896 edition, so well introduced by Mr. Farquhar- 

 son Sharp. 



It is a somewhat strange circumstance that during 

 the two or three hundred years before Somervile's time 

 no really good and reliable book on hunting had 

 appeared. Here and there, as in the Gentleman's 

 Recreation, published by Nicholas Cox in 1677, a certain 

 amount of hunting lore is collected and awkwardly set 

 forth ; but much of the information given is antiquated, 

 out of date, and often absurd. Beckford, whose work 

 on hunting, published in 1781, is still, with The Chace ^ 

 a first-rate book of reference, duly acknowledges the 

 vacuum that existed before the Warwickshire squire 

 appeared on the scene. "With regard to books," he 

 says, " Somervile is the only author whom I have 

 found of any use on this subject." Surely no higher 

 testimony could be given than this, furnished by one 



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