SEATS. 77 



good riders well know. The bridle is a much greater 

 difficulty with the race-horse than the saddle, but this 

 we must reserve for the second part of our book. 



The Hunting Seat. This is a difficult subject, and one 

 that cannot be treated dogmatically. Hunting is well 

 done in a great variety of forms, and then money is, to 

 most hunting men, a matter of secondary importance. 

 The great majority only require their horses " to go ;" 

 when they are done up they can buy others, and so on. 

 Eace-riders mount for other people's pleasure, and large 

 sums of money are at stake : hence the severe discipline 

 and the carefully-considered system of riding. The 

 preservation of the horse, too, is a great consideration : 

 the hunting man rides for his own pleasure, and is only 

 answerable to himself for his expenditure of horse-flesh. 



The author of the ' Handy Horse Book,' remarking 

 at p. 99 on the great difference in speed between English 

 and Irish fox-hunting, says " that the sound principles 

 of hunting are repeatedly sacrificed to the unnatural 

 speed to which hounds are now forced." There are, no 

 doubt, many good reasons to account for this. Most 

 men care more for " the spin " than for the hunting itself, 

 which affords merely a pretext. Perhaps, too, English 

 hunting is less a pursuit of the fox than a desperate 

 endeavour to distance Thackeray's all-pervading snob, 

 which seems, however, not always to succeed ; for, as 

 " Magenta " says, in the paragraph of this book quoted 

 above, "the hounds are so forced as to overrun the 

 scent ; then, when at fault, the entire ruck of the field 

 have an opportunity of coming up," &c., &c. 



But what we have to do with is the seat, and not 

 the hunting itself, which has been alluded to merely 



