HISTORY AND LITERATURE. 25 



Beckford, too, was evidently of the same mind with 

 Thomson. 'By inclination,' he says, 'I was never a hare- 

 hunter. I followed this diversion more for air and exercise 

 than for amusement ; and if I could have persuaded myself to 

 ride on the turnpike-road to the three-mile stone, and back 

 again, I should have thought I had no need of a pack of 

 harriers.' He adds, however, with his wonted respect for every 

 legitimate form of hunting, that he speaks only of the country 

 where he lives, where ' the hare-hunting is so bad, that, did you 

 know it, your wonder would be how I could have persevered in 

 it so long, not that I should forsake it now.' On the other 

 hand, John Smallman Gardiner, Gent., whose letters have been 

 already mentioned, has scarce words enough to express his 

 admiration of the hare as an object of chase, and his contempt 

 for the fox. He allows, indeed, that it ' would be imprudent to 

 declaim against other people's diversions to enhance the satis- 

 faction found in mine ; ' yet he does declaim, and pretty 

 vigorously, though his objections seem to be much of a nature 

 with those which a certain Etonian of a past generation found 

 against football, that it was too rough and violent to take rank 

 as a ' gentlemanly ' game ! This is what he says : * A lover of 

 hunting almost every man is, or would be thought ; but twenty 

 in the field after an hare find more delight and sincere enjoy- 

 ment than one in twenty in a fox-chase, the former consisting 

 of an endless variety of accidental delights, the latter little more 

 than hard riding, the pleasure of clearing some dangerous leap, 

 the pride of bestriding the best nag, and showing somewhat of 

 the bold horseman ; and (equal to anything) of being first in at 

 the death, after a chase frequently from county to county, and 

 perhaps above half the way out of sight or hearing of the 

 hounds. So that, but for the name of fox-hunting, a man 

 might as well mount at his stable-door, and determine to gallop 

 twenty miles an end into another county.' This is a view of 

 fox-hunting that has been accepted since Mr. Gardiner's day 

 by many less inclined to go along with him in his objections to 

 the hard riding part of it, if there be any truth in the saying 



