ON THE NATIONAL UTILITY OF HUNTING. 21 



fact, the few horses of this class now to he found are placed 

 heyond the reach of the ordinary owner of hunting sires ; and 

 by whom '? — by the foreigner, who, wiser in his generation than 

 ourselves, has snapped them up at every opportunity. Both 

 Tattersall's and Weatherby's could show records to prove that 

 when a sound and stoiit blood horse is in the market, money is 

 always forthcoming to buy him. With these the man who 

 wanted a sire for country purposes could not compete, and per- 

 force he has been obliged to put up with the weeds and cripples 

 that they rejected, but which came within his means. Mr. 

 Phillips also could throw a little light on the subject, as well as 

 ^Ir. James Fisher and others who have bought for the colonies. 

 What the access to good sires did in Yorkshire, at Petworth, 

 and at a hundred castles and granges throughout England, the 

 story of Prosper, who belonged to the Earl of Derby, of stag- 

 hunting fame, will show. Prosper was a snaffle-bridle bay, by 

 ^lilo, a son of Sir Peter Teazle, and carried Jonathan Griffin, 

 Lord Derby's huntsman, for years. He was up to thirteen 

 stone, and Lord Derby refused 700 guineas for him, and a 

 thousand for him and his half-brother Milo. Prosper was out 

 of a mare once the property of Sir H. Peyton, and they had 

 Blenheim, an own brother to him, in the stables. 



Sir Peter was himself the sire of a rare good hunter, out of a 

 daughter of his own. Fancy in the present day a Sir Peter 

 Teazle getting hunters, or even a sound, good son of such a 

 horse ! 'No, the Milos, Belzonis, Hundred House Snaps, and 

 such useful sires, are too valuable to the foreigners to be 

 wasted on English half-bred mares, even if they could be found, 

 and I am sorry to say such a contingency becomes every year 

 more unlikely. And, alas ! most of their daughters have fol- 

 lowed them across the salt sea wave, so that soon we shall be 

 landed high and dry with neither sires nor dams fit to produce 

 hunters. 



I do not say that even now we have not short-legged, sound, 

 useful strains of blood — Sir Joseph Hawley and Baron Eoths- 



