270 COVERT-SIDE SKETCHES. 



but their heart is with the deer-cart. The following may be 

 found in D'Urfey's "Pills to purge Melancholy," and will 

 serve to show that in early times the good citizens affected 

 to be sportsmen, as they do now, even if they could not ride 

 quite so straight and well, but were more likely to cut such a 

 caper as John Gilpin, or the gentleman who was taken home in 

 Brown's buggy : — 



Next once a year into Essex a hunting they go, 



To see 'em pass along, O, 'tis a most pretty show ; 



Through Cheapside and Fenchurch Street, and so to Aldgate Pump, 



Each man with his spurs in's horse's side, and his back-sword cross his rump. 



My Lord, he takes a staff in hand to beat the bushes o'er, 



I must confess it was a work he ne'er had done before. 



A creature bounceth from a bush, which made them all to laugh ; 



My Lord, he cried, a Kare, a Sare, but it proved an JEssex calf. 



And when they had done their sport, they came to London where they dwell. 



Their faces all so torn and scratch' d, their wives scarce knew them well; 



For 'twas a very great mercy, so many 'scaped alive. 



For of twenty saddles carried out, they brought home again but Five. 



The good citizens had certain privileges of hunting from the 

 earliest ages, but Stowe says, *' These exercises were not much 

 followed by the citizens of London at the close of the sixteenth 

 century — not for want of taste for the amusement, but for w^ant 

 of leisure to pursue it." Deer-carts were not invented then, I 

 jDresume, yet Strype, so late as the reign of George I., reckons 

 ''Eiding on horseback, and hunting with my Lord Mayor's 

 hounds, when the common hunt goes out," amongst their pas- 

 times 



