28 HUNTING. 



days the fox seems generally to have been hunted on foot ; 

 even in Blome's time it appears from the illustrations to his book 

 that the huntsman proper did not put his trust in the legs of a 

 horse. 



A former Lord Wilton in his ' Sports and Pursuits of the 

 English,' says it was not till 1750 that hounds were entered 

 solely to fox. But in his famous ' Quarterly ' article on ' The 

 Chase,' ' Nimrod ' quotes a letter written to him by Lord 

 Arundel, from which it appears that one of his lordship's 

 ancestors kept a pack at the close of the previous century. 

 They hunted both in Wiltshire and Hampshire, and remained 

 in the family till 1782, when they were sold to 'the great Mr. 

 Meynell,' the real father of the modern English chase. There 

 must, however, have been another pack at least coeval with 

 this, for some few years ago there was in the ' Field ' an 

 engraving of a hunting-horn in the possession of the then 

 master of the Cheshire hounds, on which was the following 

 inscription : 'Thomas Boothby, Esq., Tooley Park, Leicester. 

 With this horn he hunted the first pack of fox-hounds then in 

 England 55 years: born 1677, ^i^^ ^yS^-' Another authority 

 gives 1730 for the year when Thomas Fownes, of Stepleton in 

 Dorsetshire, kept a regular pack of fox-hounds, which were 

 afterwards sold to Mr. Bowes, of Yorkshire. It is, however, very 

 possible that Lord Wilton's date may be the correct one, for 

 there is nothing to show that these packs were not occasion- 

 ally stooped to other game than fox ; a practice which even 

 Beckford, that staunch legitimist, though he does not recom- 

 mend it, writes of as a possibility when foxes are unusually 

 scarce. According to a memoir of the Belvoir hounds, the 

 present pack can prove an uninterrupted descent from the year 

 given by Lord Wilton. Seven years earlier the records of the 

 Badminton kennels could show only one couple of fox-hounds, 

 the rest being deer-hounds and harriers. According to ' Cecil,' 

 it was not till 1762 that this famous hunt turned itself solely to 

 the chase of the fox. In that year the fifth Duke, then still a 

 minor, while passing Silk Wood on his way home after a poor 



