34 



HUNTING. 



not much to his taste. Moreover, one of his first laws was 

 never to cast his hounds so long as they would hunt ; and the 

 observation of this law was clearly not compatible with hard 

 riding. Whether the sport is now what it was in the days 

 whose glories ' Nimrod ' has written of and Aiken painted, it 

 would be as ungenerous to ask as difficult to answer. If the 

 stories unearthed by the untiring industry of ' The Druid ' 



'As we know it now.' 



may all be relied on, there must have been giants indeed 

 in those days ; hounds, horses, riders, and, we may add, foxes, 

 must all have been marvels of their kind. ' The peaches are 

 not so big now as they were in our days,' wrote Hay don to 

 Wordsworth, when they two were the sole relics ' of a glorious 

 band.' Yet ' Cecil ' vowed that ' where there was one good 

 horseman thirty years ago (that is, in the first quarter of the 

 century) there are twenty now.' The younger men of his day 



