CHAPTER XXIII 

 THE SETTERS 



I. THE ENGLISH SETTER. In some form or other Setters are 

 to be found wherever guns are in frequent use and irrespective 

 of the precise class of work they have to perform ; but their 

 proper sphere is either on the moors, when the red grouse are 

 in quest, or on the stubbles and amongst the root crops, when 

 September comes in, and the partridge season commences. 



Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, is supposed to have been 

 the first person to train setting dogs in the manner which 

 has been commonly adopted by his successors. His lordship 

 lived in the middle of the sixteenth century, and was therefore 

 a contemporary of Dr. Caius, who may possibly have been 

 indebted to the Earl for information when, in his work on 

 English Dogges, he wrote of the Setter under the name of the 

 Index. 



Though Setters are divided into three distinct varieties, 

 The English, the Irish and the Gordon, or Black and Tan 

 there can be no doubt that all have a common origin, though 

 it is scarcely probable, in view of their dissimilarity, that the 

 same individual ancestors can be supposed to be their original 

 progenitors. Nearly all authorities agree that the Spaniel 

 family is accountable on one side, and this contention is borne 

 out to a considerable extent by old illustrations and paintings 

 of Setters at work, in which they are invariably depicted as 

 being very much like the old liver and white Spaniel, though 

 of different colours. Doubt exists as to the other side of their 

 heredity, but it does not necessarily follow that all those who 

 first bred them used the same means. Of the theories put 



132 



