162 A BARONET. 



always goes the " whole hog," and is never satisfied 

 with what is reasonable. At present, nothing can be 

 fast enough: but I should not be surprised if ten 

 years hence our young sprigs of fashion voted the 



exertion of going fast a d d bore; and, if they 



did, we should see them hunting in George the 

 Fourth's pony phaetons. I should then be held as a 

 savage, a kind of Ojibbeway, inadmissible, because I 

 like hounds to go as fast as any fair hunter can carry 

 me, but at the same time letting the pace be such as 

 I can see hounds work a thing I am quite sure 

 many hunting men do not care about one farthing. 

 Fox-hunters used to decry coursers, " the mean 

 murdering coursing crew," but now they bring fox- 

 hunting as near coursing as they can. 



I have said that going out late produces the neces- 

 sity of having very fast hounds : so it does to a certain 

 degree : but this is not the " be all and the end all 

 here : " fashion is the primum mobile of the thing, and 

 a certain little, and it is a little, feeling among our 

 high-flyers adds to it. For instance : I was travel- 

 ling a few weeks since in one of those old-fashioned 

 vehicles we have heard of, a four-horse coach. In it 

 got as hard-favoured hirsute-looking a homo as one 

 would wish to see in the smiling month of April. They 

 called him Sir Thomas. Oh ! thinks I, judging from 

 his appearance, a Deputy from the King of the 

 Cannibal Islands, knighted for bringing a caudle cup 

 made of a human skull : but I was quite wrong, as I 

 found afterwards. However, not having, as some 

 law term expresses it, the " fear of God " (or at any 

 rate the fear of the Baronet) " before my eyes," we 

 got on very well together that is, neither opening 

 his mouth for the first twelve miles. "At 



