A VIRGINIAN. 37 



— extant to this day, and still almost inaccessible, by 

 which Boadicea and her brave Iceni strove to repef 

 the brazen infantry of the first C^sars. 



Time was, when the grandsires of the now rising 

 generationj the grandsires of Young England were in 

 the prime of manhood, that Melton Mowbray was but» 

 a humble country town, though the centre of the' 

 greatest hunting country the wide world has ever wit- 

 nessed. 



In those days fox hunting was a rude and barba- 

 rous sport. Fox-hunters rose in the dead of the night 

 to meet at the covert-side by daylight, and trail the 

 fox to his lair, and thence rouse him. They hunted 

 with huge, long-eared, slow, crook-kneed, dew-lapped 

 hounds ; they rode short-barreled, short-backed, ac- 

 tive half-bred cobs. They found their fox at sunrise, 

 and, if they were very fortunate, killed him about sun- 

 set. Now, all is changed. Fox-hunting is a science ; 

 the feeding, the physicking, the exercising, the break- 

 ing of the hounds, the wintering, the summering, the 

 conditioning the hunters, is a matter of as deep lore, 

 of as much difficult indoctrination, as the training of 

 a racer for four mile heats, or preparing a man for a 

 prize-fight or a foot-race. 



The men who do the thing, too, are no less changed 

 than the thing itself. 



Then it was, the Squires Westerns — the muddy- 

 beer drinking, bad-tobacco smoking, ignorant, illite- 

 rate blockheads, who never visited cities., nor thought 

 of decencies or decorums. Now it is the cream of the 

 first men of the first society in the world, for manhood 

 and cultivation, Saxon hardihood and Norman chiv- 

 alry, aristocratic refinements and popular simplicity 

 combined. 



And of these characteristics Melton shows the type. 

 It is still a country town — during the summer season, 

 nothing but the merest of country towns — in shops, in 



