THE LONG MINORITY 



Burlington, loved racing better even than fox-hunting, and is 

 said to have gambled on the turf with such judgment as not 

 to have injured his estate in the least degree. Of Sir Car- 

 naby Haggerston, who succeeded him, little or nothing is 

 known, and in all probability he was no more than a field 

 master. 



The century was now drawing to a close, and this seems 

 the right place to consider the changes that were passing 

 over the sport of hunting, and to glance at the social life of 

 those who followed the chase. 



This is a task of no small difficulty, since the records of 

 those days are singularly defective, and the conductors of the 

 Sporting Magazine, which came into being in the last decade 

 of the century,^ evidently had much ado to fill their pages. 

 Sporting readers were not too numerous, and a glance at the 

 miscellany which announces on its title-page that it deals 

 with the turf, the chase, and every other diversion interesting 

 to the man of pleasure, enterprise, and spirit, shows either 

 that the class was very various in its tastes, or that the editor 

 was not very sure what these were. The heading of " Sport- 

 ing Intelligence " contains, among other matter, the fining of 

 Lady E, Luttrel ^^50 for playing at faro, the description of 

 the death of a man who hanged himself for a wager, and 

 details of several suicides. In fox-hunting news it is an- 

 nounced that a " fine ferocious bag fox " was liberated before 

 a certain pack, and again a method of trapping foxes is 

 recommended by a gentleman, who says that hunting is too 

 laborious a method of destroying vermin for him, and this 

 without a word of comment or disapproval from the editor. 

 Indeed, if we confined our ideas on the subject of fox-hunting 

 to the literature provided for the benefit of the sportsman, we 

 should form a very inadequate notion of the position of that 

 sport at the close of the century. A careful study, however, 

 not only of the books on hunting, but of the memoirs and 

 history of the reign of George III., has convinced me that 

 fox-hunting proper is either a much older sport than has been 

 generally supposed, or that it grew to perfection in a very 

 ^ The first number was published in 1792. 

 71 



