The Holderness. 407 



THE HOLDERNESS.* 



The horse and the hound are the pride and dehght of 

 every Yorkshire man, are a subject with which he has 

 been famiHar all his life, and a topic on which he is 

 always eloquent and enthusiastic. High class horses 

 and high class hounds are apparently the natural 

 product of the county ; and men ride a better average 

 of hunter amid these northern ploughs than we see 

 bestridden even in the midlands — certainly if we con- 

 fine the comparison to animals indigenous to the two 

 localities. Lincolnshire and Yorkshire alike are 

 mostly given up to cultivation ; but they stand apart 

 from the bulk of other plough countries, in that they 

 decline to admit that foxhunting may, under such 

 condition, be carried on in a more plebeian style than 

 on fashionable galloping ground. They meet the facts 

 of cold plough and deep plough with the argument that 

 the colder the scent the cleverer the hound required, 

 and the deeper the plough the better the horse must 

 be to live with him. So their packs have for genera- 

 tions been cultured from the best blood in England ; 

 and the farmers breed and ride nothing that cannot 

 lay claim to both quality and strength. 



* Vide Stanford's " Hunting Map," Sheet 6, and Hobson's 

 Foxhunting Atlas. 



