THE HISTORY OF THE BELVOIR HUNT 



see the flying pack race over the Leicestershire pastures, 

 while on the third he may set his teeth and sit down in his 

 saddle to ride from Stubton to Wellingore, while the pack 

 works out the line over the stiff fences and across the deep 

 ploughs of Lincolnshire. Such a pack and such a country 

 are possible only under the rule of a great family, and we 

 shall see how closely connected are the fortunes of the 

 Belvoir Hunt, not only with the power and wealth, but also 

 with the personal characteristics of the house of Manners. 



Great houses are not mere accidents in the history of our 

 nation, they are the result of certain inherited qualities in 

 their members. They hold their own in the struggle for 

 existence because they have a capacity to produce, genera- 

 tion after generation, men of the stuff from which rulers, 

 soldiers, and statesmen are made. No genius, however great, 

 even though it be that of a Napoleon or a Cromwell, is 

 sufficient of itself to found a house. And our great English 

 families have been marked by a taste for the chase, which 

 in its pleasures and its hardships, its joys and its disappoint- 

 ments, is a great school for the leaders of men. 



But such an establishment as the Belvoir Hunt, though 

 it rests in the first instance on the fact that the chase has 

 always been a favourite recreation of our English nobles, 

 could not have lasted on into our own day unless it had 

 had a wider basis. As you stand on the terrace at Belvoir, 

 or ride across the Lincolnshire fields round Grantham, you 

 see everywhere around you the houses and the homesteads 

 of the squires and farmers who have given their support to, 

 and been in their turn moulded by, the great hunt, which for 

 so many years gave the one glimpse into the outer world 

 possible to the less wealthy dwellers in the country. From 

 the dawn of the century to about 1840 the hunt was the great 

 social tie which bound men together, and was the link con- 

 necting the dwellers on the soil with the great world which 

 was so much farther off before railways, telegraphs, and 

 steamboats had combined to destroy half the charm and 

 nearly all the neighbourliness of country life. In the hunt- 

 ing field the Lincolnshire yeomen and the Lincolnshire 



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