192 HUNTING. 



sober-suited days a certain amount of splendour must neces- 

 sarily seem to belong to the hunting field, and the dandies of 

 Melton and Market Harboro' are, no doubt, very great dandies 

 indeed, as were their fathers before them. But when they can 

 carry their splendours well to the front for forty minutes from 

 Ranksboro' Gorse or the Coplow, nor fear to smirch them in the 

 murky waters of the Whissendine, or the bullfinches of Ashby 

 Pastures, no one would think of quarrelling with those minute 

 and various sacrifices to the graces which your true hunting 

 dandy would as soon think of omitting as he \vould of turning 

 aside from a nasty place for fear of soiling their beauty. It is 

 only when those splendours are seen jogging along lanes, or 

 waiting their turn at gates and gaps, that they have the effect 

 of making their wearer ridiculous. In the hunting field, as 

 everywhere else, a humbug is a bad man. If your style of riding 

 be quiet, it is well that your appearance should be * in concate- 

 nation accordingly.' 



No man, then, deserves to be ridiculed or despised because 

 he has not the courage and the skill necessary to enable him 

 to ride close and straight to hounds when they are really 

 running over a strongly fenced country, provided always that 

 he is careful not to assume the virtue that he has not. It is 

 clear that if it were to be regarded as a canon law of hunting 

 that no man should make his appearance at the covert side 

 unless he be prepared to follow the fortunes of the pack to 

 the bitter end, like the lover in Moore's poem, 



Through joy and through torment, through glory and shame, 



a great number of honest souls would be arbitrarily deprived of 

 an innocent and healthful amusement. Nay, it will often 

 happen that a man who can ride, and does when the fit is on 

 him, for some reason or other disinclination, ill-health, a dis- 

 appointment in the stable, or any of those thousand and one 

 ills to which fox-hunting flesh is heir will for the nonce content 

 himself with the part of spectator from the back of some safe 

 and quiet hack, or possibly even on wheels. Such a one will, 



