CAPTAIN SHABBYHOUNDE 247 



title of Honourable — "Honourable Milksop" — according to 

 the then Cambridge idiom, why the Captain took him at once 

 under his wing — a most prudent proceeding, seeing that it 

 not only increased his own consequence, but prevented any 

 of those illiberal remarks or insinuations that an opposition 

 Shabbyhounde might indulge in. The Captain and Julius 

 very soon struck up a dialogue, for Julius was just of the age 

 to rush into indiscriminate acquaintances, and a youth — nay a 

 man — entering a strange hunting field, is very like a fresh boy 

 turned into a school — glad to take up with the first one that 

 speaks to them. Since Mr. Lockhart went down into Leices- 

 tershire with his good little " bay horse," and wrote the 

 surprising article on the " Chase," in the " Quarterly Review," 

 people have been rather suspicious of strangers in the hunting 

 field, and many a man has been charged with being a 

 Quarterly Reviewer, whose banker's or whose betting-book has 

 been his only claim to literature. Authorship somehow is not 

 a popular trade in the countrj-. Nimrod was the only author 

 on horseback who could fairly face a hunting field in //v/'/Vrt 

 pcisona. There was no mystery or concealment about him. 

 He went in as Nimrod, and as Nimrod he wished to be known. 

 He even indulged in the lordly privilege of putting " Nimrod " 

 on the backs of his letters. But to our story — the Honourable 

 Julius Milksop is landed in Northamptonshire, and "taken 

 up " by Captain Shabbyhounde, who, riding his best horse, 

 had got his leather breeches on, and looked more like the 

 gentleman, if not more like the fo.x-hunter than usual. 



After giving the hounds the usual run of the evergreens 

 about Kelmarsh, and drawing Scotland Wood blank, they 

 trotted away to a cover on some broken ground on a hill side 

 belonging to Sir Justinian Isham, called Blue Devils, or blue 

 something we forget what, when a whimper and the Squire's 

 cheery holloa as he worked among the gorse on foot 

 proclaimed the varmint astir, as was very soon confirmed by 



