The Sport of Our (Ancestors 



(Nimrod) was the prototype of Pomponius Ego. Poor 

 Mr. Apperley ! If he sate for the portrait the artist has 

 been cruel. Nobody can have been nearly such an ass as 

 Pomponius Ego. But to paint pleasing portraits with his 

 pen was not characteristic of Surtees. With one or two 

 exceptions, such as Squire Jovey Jessop in * Plain or Ringlets? ' 

 and Michael Hardy in ^ Handley CrosSy^ there is hardly a lov- 

 able character in the whole of his gallery. There is nothing 

 gentle or noble about any of them. The Duke of Tergiver- 

 sation in his social and private life was the slimmest of the 

 slim, having at his command ' an engaging smile, well 

 calculated to throw a stranger off his guard.' He would do 

 you if he could. Politically he was a turncoat of the most 

 versatile description, who was always ready to rat at a 

 moment's notice if there was the slightest glimmer of office. 

 If he had lived any time during the last fifty years, he would 

 probably have begun his career as a Gladstonian Radical 

 and finished it as a Die-Hard. The Earl of Scamperdale 

 was a coarse and repellent backwoodsman who could not 

 speak the truth if he tried. And so with all the others. 

 You may search his books from end to end without finding 

 a single individual, unless it were Lucy Glitters for the sake 

 of her good looks, in whose society you would care to spend 

 the evening. But the function of the satirist is not to manu- 

 facture characters like Jane Eyre. He is concerned with 

 the petty and the sordid and the vulgar. And in doing so 

 Surtees has made for himself a name which has already 

 stood the test of three-quarters of a century, and bids fair 

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