288 STAG-HUNTING RECOLLECTIONS 



horsemanship, whether mihtary or civiHan,has been gradually 

 superseded. Early in the sixties hunting dress began to 

 change, and new dress regulations found their way into the 

 hunting text-books. Many of the gentlemen who hunted 

 with the Imperial pack and M. Aguado's boarhounds had at 

 this time taken to scarlet coats, blue bird's-eye neckcloths, 

 cords of a horrid ochre hue, and top-boots. Neither they 

 nor their valets managed very well at that time, and the 

 result was neither one thing nor the other. They would 

 not have looked right at Kirby Gate, and somehow they 

 looked wrong at La Croix du Grand Veneur. Style and 

 saddlery followed suit — the whip was carried differently, no 

 longer up like a drawn sword, or poised to a discreet parallel 

 with your horse's crest and pointing to a future between 

 his ears. By 1870 the rigour of the game had relaxed. 

 Haute ecole may still have reigned, but it no longer 

 governed. Personally I am rather sorry that its glory should 

 have departed. France used to be its Shiloh. Henri III., 

 one of the few Valois who did not hunt, when he heard that 

 the Duke of Burgundy had accused him of living like a 

 monk, rode a school horse over a high leaping-bar in the 

 presence of a gentleman of Burgundy, and bade him go back 

 and tell his master what he had seen the monk do. The 

 Duke of Newcastle in his book on manege-riding instances five 

 French gentlemen ' as the best of his acquaintance and in the 

 world.' The Connetable Montmorency, he tells us, invented 

 a bit and spurs which were unrivalled. A school horse com- 

 manded a higher price in France than anywhere else. The 

 Due de Guise bid the Duke, then plain Mr. Cavendish, six 

 hundred pistoles for a grey leaping horse ' who could cut 

 surpassing caprioles, take the highest and justest leaps with- 

 out assistance,' and throw himself ' terra a terra ' an incre- 

 dible number of metres in the riding-school. The main ob- 

 jection Addison's Tory foxhunter urges against France is 

 the loss of a man's hunting seat. The whole vocabulary of 



