34 HARE-HUNTING AND HARRIERS 



hospitality on a scale entirely incommensurate with his 

 means." Drink eventually got the better of him and 

 brought him to his end. His favourite tipple was a 

 kind of punch composed of rum, black currant jelly, 

 and a little hot water, a mixture " excellent and heal- 

 ing," says his friend and neighbour, the poet Shenstone, 

 " after a hard day's exercise, when taken moderately, 

 but in Somervile's case an insinuating poison." 



" Nimrod," in his second tour, tells some amusing 

 anecdotes of one of these convivial souls of the eighteenth 

 and early nineteenth centuries, a Cheshire squire, 

 named Leech. " One of his bottle companions of the 

 sacerdotal order asked him to go to church and hear 

 him preach. He afterwards wished to know what he 

 thought of his sermon. ' Why,' replied Mr. Leech, 

 ' / like you better in bottle than in wood.'' " A smart 

 repartee, truly ! 



It is clear that many of these squires of the eighteenth 

 century drifted almost insensibly from hare-hunting 

 to the pursuit of the fox. In the seventeenth century, 

 as I have shown, the hare was regularly hunted with 

 a pack of hounds, the fox not nearly so often, being 

 more usually driven to earth by beagles and terriers, 

 dug out and slain. In time the fox was promoted to 

 a higher position in the scale of hunting, and the same 

 hounds often pursued both hare and fox indifferently. 

 In 1826 it is stated in the Sporting Magazine that Sir 

 Watkin Wynn's harriers were then more like fox- 

 hounds, and drew for wild foxes as well as hunted bag- 

 men. Bagmen, by the way, seem to have been much 

 more common in those days than they are now. Like 

 Sir Watkin Wynn's hounds — now and for many years 

 past one of the most noted packs of foxhounds in the 

 kingdom — many other harrier packs, owned by hard- 

 riding squires'^'of the eighteenth century, were the 



