34 



HUNTING. 



not much to his taste. Moreover, one of his first laws was 

 never to cast his hounds so long as they would hunt \ and the 

 obser\-ation of this law was clearly not compatible with hard 

 riding. Whether the sport is now what it was in the days 

 whose glories ' Nimrod ' has written of and Aiken painted, it 

 would be as ungenerous to ask as difficult to answer. If the 

 stories unearthed by the untiring industry of 'The Druid' 





As we know it now. ' 



may all be relied on, there must have been giants indeed 

 in those days ; hounds, horses, riders, and, we may add, foxes, 

 must all have been marvels of their kind. ' The peaches are 

 not so big now as they were in our days,' wrote Haydon to 

 Wordsworth, when they two were the sole relics ' of a glorious 

 band.' Yet ' Cecil ' vowed that ' where there was one good 

 horseman thirty years ago (that is, in the first quarter of the 

 century j there arc twenty now.' The younger men of his day 



