THE HISTORY OF THE BELVOIR HUNT 



hunting field, and their advantages even from a business 

 point of view became evident, and fox-hunting gradually 

 grew to be the sport of the middle classes as much as that 

 of the nobles. And in sharing the sport of his superiors in 

 rank, the young middle-class Englishman began to acquire the 

 virtues and good qualities of a governing race, and to graft 

 on his sturdy common sense, the habits of regularity and the 

 business capacity which have always distinguished his own 

 class, the boldness, the dash, and the endurance that are 

 common characteristics of our aristocracy. It is these latter 

 which have served in our own day to help us to create a 

 flourishing province out of a desert, to regenerate an ancient 

 and glorious kingdom, and to rule successfully an immense 

 dependency of mixed races. It is no mere defence of a 

 favourite recreation, or excuse for a pursuit in which so 

 many delight, but in a serious spirit of thoughtful deduction 

 from facts, that I claim for fox-hunting more particularly 

 that grafting of aristocratic virtues on a democratic polity 

 which is the peculiar source and strength of English char- 

 acter and power of rule. 



Nor need the reader accuse me of undue digression, for in 

 many respects Lord Granby was the type of the Englishman 

 formed by our school life and our sports ; and if the type is 

 commoner now, as it undoubtedly is, than was the case in the 

 eighteenth century, that is one of the results of the ideals in 

 school life and in sport being to raise all training, mental 

 and bodily, to the level of the higher classes, rather than to 

 bring down the higher to the level of the lower. Every 

 Englishman, as Mr. Rudyard Kipling has told us in verse 

 and prose, is an aristocrat when among an inferior race ; and 

 from the rare insight Kipling has into the many-sided char- 

 acter of our national life, that great genius has risen to be 

 the laureate of England, and the English as formed by 

 the hunting field, the cricket pitch, and the football 

 ground. 



By the time Lord Granby was twenty-one, he had learned 

 to write verses at Eton and to read the classics in the 

 Cambridge fashion at Trinity. He had travelled with the 



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