The Sport of Our Ancestors 



depicting an atmosphere and an environment, or do they 

 get their effect by the deHneation of personaHty and char- 

 acter ? Mr. Surtees certainly succeeds in both ways. No 

 one can deny his skill in penetrating character. And even 

 the most serious student of the countryside of the last 

 century will derive profit from reading his works. For our 

 author had the great advantage of knowing his subject. 

 He was himself a sportsman and country gentleman, being 

 the owner of Hamsterley Hall, near Newcastle-on-Tyne. 

 The date of his birth is not recorded in 'Burke's Landed 

 Gentry,' but he was married in 1841, and died in 1864, so he 

 saw the country pass through the shoals of Reform Bill, 

 railways, and Repeal of the Corn Laws, into the smooth 

 water of the fifties. He hunted with many English packs, 

 as well as on the fells of Northumberland and Berwickshire. 

 It must have been on these hunting tours that he met the 

 prototypes from which he is believed to have modelled — 

 not always too mercifully — some of the characters in his 

 books. His style of writing is animated by a keen sense 

 of the ridiculous, and fortified by an acute observation of 

 the tendencies of the age in which he lived. 



36 



