LORD MANNERS 359 



Harborough, and took up his residence at Stapleford 

 Park, near Melton Mowbray, a place which for many 

 years, it may be remembered, had been not only rigo- 

 rously closed against foxhounds, but had its coverts 

 studded with dog-spears. Lady Harborough, however, 

 removed these engines, and gave the hounds free access 

 to the coverts. 



In the first year of Lord Manners's mastership 

 there died, at Eastwell Rectory, a sporting clergyman 

 who was reverenced throughout the length and breadth 

 of Leicestershire, the Rev. Edward Bullen, who was 

 in his eighty-ninth year at the time of his death. At 

 the age of five years he followed his father's harriers 

 on a pony, and then for more than eighty years he was 

 an ardent follower of the Quorn. In his heaviest 

 days he never scaled more than nine stone, so he had 

 no difficulty in mounting himself, and being a super- 

 lative horseman, whatever he rode carried him to the 

 front. One of his horses was a chestnut, which roared 

 like a bull, but carried him through deep ground and 

 over any fence which intervened. In fact he was really 

 a horse whose noise did not stop him. 



It should not be left unsaid that Lord Manners, in 

 his last year of mastership, came to the front in making 

 Adam's Gorse a better covert than perhaps it had ever 

 been before. When Sir Richard Sutton guided the 

 fortunes of the Ouorn there were several unconnected 

 patches of gorse, at no great distance, surrounding a 

 spinney near Ashby Folville, and hence it was that the 

 covert was called a gorse. These patches, however, 

 being unfenced, the cattle exterminated them, and even- 

 tually only a few straggling plants were to be seen. 

 For several years, therefore, there was no shelter for a 

 fox, except in a somewhat hollow spinney, and the term 

 " gorse," when that gorse was broken down, was certainly 

 a misnomer. Then Lord Manners came forward, and 



