Scats. 83 



T/je Hunting Seat. — This is a difficult subject, and 

 one that cannot be treated dogmatically Hunting is 

 ivell done in a great variety of forms, and then money 

 is, to most hunting men, a matter of secondary import- 

 ance. The great majority only require their horses " to 

 go;''^ when they are done up they can buy others, and 

 so on. Race-riders mount for other people's pleasure, 

 and large sums of money are at stake : hence the severe 

 discipline and the carefully-considered system of riding. 

 The preservation of the horse, too, is a great considera- 

 tion: the hunting man rides for his own pleasure, and 

 is only answerable to himself for his expenditure of 

 horse-flesh. 



The author of the "Handy Horse-Book," remarking 

 at p. 99 on the great difl^erence in speed between Eng- 

 lish and Irish fox-hunting, says " that the sound princi- 

 ples of hunting are repeatedly sacrificed to the unnatural 

 speed to which hounds are now forced." There are, 

 no doubt, many good reasons to account for this. Most 

 men care more for ''the spin" than for the hunting 

 itself, which aflbrds merely a pretext. Perhaps, too, 

 English hunting is less a pursuit of the fox than a des- 

 perate endeavor to distance Thackeray's all-pervading 

 snob, which seems, however, not always to succeed ; for, 

 as " Magenta " says, in the paragraph of his book quoted 

 above, " the hounds are so forced as to overrun the 

 scent ; then, when at fault, the entire ruck of the field 

 have an opportunity of coming up," etc., etc. 



But what we have to do with is the seat, and not the 

 hunting itself, which has been alluded to merely be- 

 cause the pace has evidently a good deal to do with the 

 form of the seat. For, in fact, men of fifty years old 

 and thereabout can scarcely fail to remember that the 

 length of our saddles has been increasing constantly 

 with the rapidity of the pace ; and although an increase 

 of the bearing surface of the saddle, as has been already 



