V EN ERIE AND THE V A LOIS 251 



given in return. Thns George III. recognised Arthur Young's 

 services to agriculture by the gift of a Spanish merino ram. 



Indeed, assuming a happy selection of examples, an 

 interesting chapter might be written on the antiquity and 

 modernnessof this kind of present. From Solomon's Temple 

 to the stud farm at Sandringham, gifts of this kind and ex- 

 changes of blood may easily be traced back authentically to the 

 very earliest times, and can be brought as easily up to date. It 

 is a note of the inclinations and pursuits of a large section of 

 human beings in all times. Like playing the trumpet, the 

 habit has neither gained nor lost by the progress of civilisa- 

 tion and the frequent reconstruction of human ideas and 

 societies. 



The French hound of high degree to this day claims 

 descent from the gift of a subject to his sovereign. I am 

 not sure of the date, but in the latter half of the fifteenth 

 century a poor country gentleman of Poitou gave a hound 

 called ' Souillard ' to Louis XL There v^as nothing remark- 

 able in the colour. The w^hite St. Huberts vi^ere already an 

 ascertained breed, and although the Duke of Burgundy of 

 Quentin Durward's time hunted the ' Kouge Sanglier ' w^ith 

 the mastiff-like hounds I alluded to in the last chapter, 

 his successor in 1608 kept a strong pack of tvi^enty to 

 twenty-five couple of notable staghounds. ' Chiens merlants 

 issus de la variete blanche des chiens de St. Hubert.' ^ 

 But this particular hound came to Plessis les Tours with 

 the reputation of being something quite out of the common. 

 As Louis XL liked greyhounds better than line hunters, very 

 little further notice was taken of Souillard. However, he 



' A royal pack of this strain was held in great esteem in Louis XIV. 's time. 

 Unlike most French hounds, they went a great pace, and were said to bay their 

 stag in twenty minutes. In 1709 orders were given by the king to M. de la 

 Rochefoucauld, the Grand Veneur, to slow down the ' grands chiens blancs,' 

 as they went too fast for him as he got older. (Baron Dunoyer de Noirmont, 

 Hist, de la Cltasse oi France.) 



