JOHN OF THE HILL 



easily guess your health is in a very good state, and able to 

 bear both the present severity of the weather and the tire- 

 someness of the sport. As for your studies, which you say 

 are suspended by unavoidable interruptions, I hope, my Lord, 

 the time may come (and I long for nothing more) when your 

 Grace will have some opportunities of a more frequent con- 

 versation with the muses. We have in town an extreme 

 severe frost, harder than has been known these many years. 

 From this occasion I was induced to send you the ninth ode 

 of the first book of Horace, which he entitles to his friend 

 Thaliarchus ; written certainly, as the first stanza intimates, in 

 a season much like ours now, much frosty and snowy. The 

 poet arms himself against the cold with the usual weapons, 

 good fire and wine, spending his time during the sharpness 

 of the winter in such ways as did exercise his body more than 

 his brains. 



"The season must be more intolerable than any within 

 my memory, or else I must have been grown very old on a 

 sudden, for this is the first winter when I could not be in my 

 study without a fire. I wish that the sports that you design 

 to divert you with may not onely not hurt but confirm 

 your health and induce to the lengthening of your life." 



The correspondence, however, shows conclusively that the 

 Duke had had a pack of foxhounds for some time previous 

 to 1730, which year has been fixed by more than one writer 

 as the date when the Belvoir pack first began to hunt the fox. 



VI 



" I very much, my Lord, doubt whether Horace can so 

 often crowd into your company among the pleasing diver- 

 sions you have at Exton, of which I heard by a noble lady, 

 a relation of Lord How, when I was in company yesterday. 

 However, my Lord, I was infinitely pleased that among those 

 diversions no mention was made of very violent ones, such as 

 fox-hunting. Your Grace must give me leave every now and 

 then to touch upon that string which I know to be so pre- 

 judicious to the harmony of your health, and your good nature 



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