THE HOUSE OF MANNERS AND THE CHASE 



squires met on terms of equality the royal dukes, the wits, 

 the dandies, and the statesmen of the day. There the re- 

 presentatives of such different classes learned to know and 

 to like one another, and the respect and admiration there 

 gained was on quite other lines than is usual with the world 

 at large. All this and much more may be traced to the fact 

 of the hounds being owned by a family which in the town 

 represented the country, and to the country brought the 

 refinements of the town. The real value of this in the history 

 of our national life can only be estimated when we consider 

 how perilously near England was, in the seventeenth and 

 eighteenth centuries, to an unhealthy separation between the 

 life of the town and that of the country. No one who has 

 studied the letters and memoirs of the latter part of the last 

 and the early years of the present century, can fail to notice 

 how great a gulf was then opening between town and country. 

 To many of the writers, such as Walpole, Pope, Johnson, 

 Selwyn, Chesterfield, Wraxall, and Raikes, life outside the 

 towns was synonymous with all that was dull, unlettered, and 

 uncultured, and many men, like Lord Chesterfield, looked 

 upon a stay at his country seat as a time of hopeless dulness. 

 The society of the country was considered to be made up of 

 men of the type rendered famous by Fielding's immortal 

 Squire Western and Dr. Johnson's Bluster, men full of strong 

 ale, heady port, and strange oaths, or the equally ignorant 

 and much meaner-spirited petty tyrant of the soil. The 

 manner of life of such old sportsmen is set forth with some 

 humour in the following sketch : ^ — 



An Old Sportsman 



Delineated by Lord Shaftesbury 



" In the year 1638 lived Mr. Hastings, at Woodlands, in the 

 county of Southampton ; by his quality, son, brother, and 

 uncle to the Earls of Huntingdon. He was, peradventure, 

 an original in our age, or rather the copy of our antient 

 nobility in huntings not in warlike times. He was very low, 



' sporting Anecdotes^ p. 103 et seq, 

 7 



