JOHN OF THE HILL 



master of, I wish, indeed, I were able to make every lesson 

 of mine so acceptable as to charm you with the beauties of 

 those two languages." 



In these two delightful letters we see Maittaire with 

 pleasant tact choosing for the Duke's study a passage which 

 he thinks will interest him. For no sportsman could read 

 the story of the hunt of Actseon by his own hounds un- 

 moved, or without regretting that so excellent a kennel 

 huntsman as that unlucky man should have been destroyed 

 in order to gratify the prudery of the goddess, whose flirta- 

 tions with Endymion were probably not altogether what her 

 affectation of extreme modesty would have had her nymphs to 

 believe. Poor Actaeon was obviously sacrificed to the neces- 

 sity of keeping up appearances, and was probably not the 

 first, as he was certainly not the last gallant sportsman, who 

 has shared a like fate. Being the keen huntsman he was, we 

 may imagine even when he found himself, so to speak, un- 

 carted before the pack, he must have enjoyed the music of 

 his hounds in full cry. 



" Resonat latratibus ethers 



But how he must have regretted not having steadied the 

 pack from deer to fox. Was that the lesson intended by 

 Maittaire ? The tutor had evidently taken pains to inform 

 himself on some matters connected with hunting, and he had 

 probably, like most visitors to Belvoir, learnt something of 

 the hounds by seeing them in their kennel. It must be 

 confessed that his translations of the Latin or Greco-Latin 

 names of the hounds (of Actaeon) do him credit. Thus Nape 

 becomes Forester, Harpyia, Harpy, Aello, Stormer, said by 

 Ovid to be a particularly stout hound, and Hylaktor, Ring- 

 wood, all happy in their discovery of modern equivalents for 

 the old Roman kennel names. 



Some days after this dissertation on the hounds, Mait- 

 taire sends the following letter (III.), which speaks for itself, 

 and in another communication to his pupil (IV.) we find a 

 certain ignorance of sport displayed in Maittaire's allusion to 

 frost, which is perhaps excusable in one of his birth and 



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