GEORGIAN STAG-HUNTING 29 



signed by the Kanger of Windsor or his deputy. As the 

 Great Western, one of the motor muscles of the Queen's 

 Hounds, was not available in those days, Londoners could 

 hardly have got as far as Windsor ; but be that as it may, 

 the London merchants and tradesmen have been fond of 

 hunting from old time. A charter of Henry I. entitled the 

 citizens of London to hunt deer ' as freely as their ancestors 

 had done ' in the Chiltern Hundreds, Middlesex, or Surrey, 

 and the wolf in Middlesex and up to the northern gate of 

 the City. The Lord Mayor of London, who is still regarded 

 by many French newspapers and most French people as the 

 head of most of our institutions, including the House of 

 Lords, was the ex-ofiflcio master of the ' Common hunt,' and 

 riding to it was an ancient and cherished civic right. But 

 an ' inundation ' of building, to quote a contemporary writer, 

 spoiled the Common hunt country in the reign of Elizabeth. 

 Deer were getting scarce, for the forest country was shrink- 

 ing away before the needs of population, and the fields 

 of Islington and St. Giles no longer witnessed the once 

 familiar spectacle of a hare or a stag pursued with due 

 solemnity by the sleek pack of some worshipful City com- 

 pany. With less hunting, gout, which was at this time 

 styled ' the enemy,' began to infest the well-to-do City men. 

 They soon became, like George Selwyn's friend, too ' able ' 

 judges of a turtle. In his 'Pills to Purge Melancholy,' 

 D'Urfey makes fun — or what passes for fun in his estima- 

 tion—of the Common hunts, and describes the City notables 

 riding through Cheapside and Fenchurch Street with their 

 spurs put on upside down and their backswords across their 

 rumps. Arrived at the fixture the master gets to business : 



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 the bush, which made them all to lau^h. 



My Lord he cried, ' A hare ! a hare ! ' but it proved an Essex calf. 



And so on and so on. 



