GEORGIAN STAG-HUNTING 35 



decked with this ' post-boy ornament.' No doubt he pretended 

 not to see him. In short, the dc^ctor feels quite sick and sore 

 about them, especially when hc^ hears ' a well fancied oatli 

 from the mint of the metropolis ' robbed of all its ' grace ' 

 by their vile pronunciation. ' Oh ! ' he cries, ' better is the 

 corner of a housetop than an habitation amongst such tents 

 of Kedar.' ' 



But about the middle of the eighteenth century a change 

 in habits began to operate. It was partly dae perhaps to 

 Walpole's policy of proscription, and its political and social 

 effect upon the Tories, but anyhow a larger country life came 

 into fashion. The management of their estates, the breeding 

 of stock, drainage, planting, and reclamation, as against the 

 laying out of formal gardens and the posting of statuary, 

 began to interest people. Lord Chesterfield's letters to his 

 son, written with the object of making him a cunning and 

 accomplished man of the town-world — for he was not to hunt 

 like Wyndham, a Master of the Buckhounds, and only to eat, 

 not to kill game — resulted in the best picture of him being 

 the one in which he is talking over the points of a prize 

 heifer with his agent in a straw-yard. George III. would have 

 been delighted. ' For my part,' he said, when he read Lord 

 Chesterfield's letters, ' I like more straightforward work.' 

 The days of the country bumpkin who hunted all the 

 morning, and, to Lord Chesterfield's disgust, appeared in 

 the Pump-rooms at Bath in boots and spurs, a leather 

 cap and a deerskin waistcoat, were numbered. He was no 

 longer to be the interpreter of country life, and country life 



' Dr. W^arnev, like many parsons, knew what a hunter should be. It 

 was after the ' hard day's christening ' that he writes, over-full of claret, to his 

 patron about his travelling hackney : ' I was hunting yesterday on Bay Spavin, 

 who astonished me with the discovery of qualities I never knew he possessed ; 

 agile as a spaniel and resolute as a lion. He wants thrashing along the road, 

 but in the Held, where I took him yesterday for the first time, he is all anima- 

 tion.' 



D 2 



