170 GENERAL TREATMEXT OF HORSES. 



was about to undo all that his groom and himself 

 had been doing during the nine preceding months, 

 namely, to destroy the perfect state of condition 

 which he was at that time lamenting over. Still 

 more strange, however, is the fact, that although 

 the evils of this out-of-door system for three months 

 in the year, to an animal who lived the other nine 

 in warm stables and well clothed, were hinted at 

 by Mr. Beckford, in his celebrated Letters upon 

 Hunting, and abandoned by a few of our first-rate 

 sportsmen of, and subsequent to, his day, and par- 

 ticularly about the commencement of the present 

 century, by the example of the Earl of Sefton, 

 when he was owner of the Quorndon hounds, in 

 Leicestershire, still the ruinous system of the three 

 and generally four months'* run at grass (viz., from 

 1st of May to the 12th or 20th of August) con- 

 tinued to be practised until these evils were exposed 

 in all their appalling deformity, and the advan- 

 tages of an opposite system made manifest, in a 

 series of letters by the present writer in the Old 

 Sporting Magazine, which have since been published 

 in a separate form, and very widely circulated. We 

 may also add, that the eftect of this exposure has 

 been nearly a general abandonment of the grazing 

 system in the studs of all men who mean to ride 

 near hounds. 



Previously to our enumerating the real advan- 

 tages of the modern system of " summering the 

 hunter,'*'' we will state the imaginary ones of the 

 old one, and which, as may be supposed, are still 

 held to be such by those who reluctantly acquiesce 



