294 Hunting Countries of England. 



visitors. If tliey did not hunt quite as often as the 

 MeltonianSj they had four or five days a week of good 

 sport offered them ; on some days they had as fine a 

 country as Leicestershire could have given ; and on 

 non-hunting days a great deal more was — and is — to 

 be done at Leamington than at Melton- A Melton 

 man, with the town to himself on a hunting day, — 

 whether from want of a horse or other baneful accident 

 — feels, and looks, as though he were forsaken by 

 Providence and by man. But at Leamington it is very 

 difierent. It is not incumbent — it is even difficult— to 

 hunt six days a week : there is pleasant idling on the 

 olf days ; and the wifely sentiment that ^' men think 

 of nothing but their tiresome hunting '' is not so often 

 heard here. An old authority, speaking years ago of 

 Leamington and the Members of the Warwickshire 

 Hunt, set it down that there was " more spirit among 

 them in the way of promoting hunt balls, club dinners, 

 &c., than there is among three-fourths of the hunts in 

 the kingdom.'^ The Warwickshire Hunt Club still 

 exists. The subscription to it is independent of that 

 to the hounds ; and is eight guineas a year, six of which 

 are employed in giving an annual ball, alternately at 

 Warwick and Stratford-on-Avon. Formerly there was 

 also an annual dinner ; but that has been discontinued 

 some twelve years ; and the remaining two guineas go 

 to the Covert Fund. In the days of Lord Waterford 

 and Capt. Lamb, Yellow Dwarf and Vivian, and when 

 Leamington was almost the headquarters of Hunt 

 Steeplechases, the Warwickshire Country included 

 what is now separate as the North Warwickshire, — the 

 divisioD only becoming a recognised fact in 1853. A 



