LORD FOLEY 83 



a successful master ; he was, as already mentioned, bold 

 over a country ; he had engaging manners, and was 

 courteous to, and popular with, every one. The fixtures, 

 even from the time of Mr. Meynell, were advertised in 

 somewhat casual fashion. During some seasons they 

 were notified with tolerable regularity, and then per- 

 haps a season or two would pass with hardly an an- 

 nouncement. In Lord Foley's time, however, hunting 

 men in general expressed a wish that the appointments 

 of all the packs should be made public, and the Leicester 

 Journal, among other papers, invited those who were 

 acquainted with the fixtures to send them to the office. 



Unluckily for the Ouorn, Lord Foley "flirted with 

 the elephant's tooth," as dicing was called at that time, 

 while he was also the racing confederate of the notori- 

 ously extravagant Colonel Mellish, to whom it was said 

 the Prince of Wales offered to grant perpetual leave from 

 the 10th Hussars lest he should lead the younger officers 

 of that regiment into imitating his lavishness. Mr. 

 Raikes, who for something like a quarter of a century 

 lived upon terms of great intimacy with Lord Foley, has 

 left it on record in his journal that the latter was a some- 

 what important person on the turf, and writing of the 

 days when the Prince of Wales patronised Brighton and 

 attended the races there and at Lewes, gives a vivid 

 description of the scene on the Steyne, where the morn- 

 ing betting took place, and where Lord Foley and 

 Colonel Mellish were conspicuous characters. 



Dicing, racing, profuse hospitality, and the master- 

 ship of the Ouorn hounds, however, caused money to 

 vanish quickly, and for one reason and another Lord 

 F"oley gave up the country late in 1806, 1 after having 



1 Much of the trouble of ascertaining dates arises from the fact of the 

 papers being in the habit of using the names of past masters. The Quorn 

 were called " Meynell's " hounds after Lord Sefton took them, and then, in 

 a local paper dated 23rd January 1827, we read that Lord Foley's hounds 

 met at Oadby Toll-bar on the 20th. In the very next sentence Mr. Assheton 

 Smith is spoken of as the master. 



